Citation needed.
>Well. I'd rather not have anyone suggest tox.
I'm repeating myself, but for all the hate it gets, I'm unable to come up with a better suggestion than Tox. There's always some kind of flaw: Centralized, no forward secrecy, end to end encryption optional, no way to verify contacts and so on.
The fact is we mostly know what kind of attacks are possible on signal. We know metadata is a potential problem. We know what kind of tradeoffs we get with a centralised architecture. We know how that works and how to mitigate some things. Openwhispersystems have been clear about what Signal provides and what it does not provide (even the wording around disappearing messages is well chosen not to confuse people ).
With tox there is a lot we don't know. Are the supernodes an attack vector? Why aren't the devs clear about using a less distributed architecture for mobile clients? Why don't they provide proper forward secrecy yet they claim to do so? There might be lots of strange properties of doing crypto distributed.
I would not recommend it for secure communication until the amount of unknowns is smaller. It is really that simple.
So your citation for sticking to their old ways is pointing to some old example? That's not what I was looking for.
>Why aren't the devs clear about using a less distributed architecture for mobile clients?
Because it's not a priority to them; Or to me, for that matter. (I don't IM on the phone)
>I would not recommend it for secure communication until the amount of unknowns is smaller.
I don't see how the likes of Signal or the popular Telegram are any better in that regard. Also, adding more features (your phone suggestion) wouldn't help.
Tox has not had this amount of attention and it is written by people who seemed to sincerely believe that using nacl/libsodium made tox safe. If that is not a huge red flag, then I don't know what is.
Telegram is not encrypted by default and when it is it uses a weird protocol, which people warned about from the beginning. The devs were cocky even after a probably unintentional backdoor was found that would have let the server mitm every encrypted communication.
The difference between these three for secure communication is huge.
So basically, argument from authority. No Good.
This is pretty bad, but so is having had your private key compromised in the first place. It should be fixed next time they do a flag day.
Other than that, and the rekeying issue (keys are only renewed when the client is closed. They should be on a period of time, to make forward secrecy really effective), nothing else bad was found.
Notice that, for a couple years now, effort has gone into polishing (toktok) toxcore and documenting things, rather than else (eg: adding fancy features). That's a good thing.
Tox might be understaffed and progressing slowly, but there's nothing fundamentally bad about it. They got a bunch of important things (really distributed, DHT, public keys as addresses, temporal keys for forward secrecy, always end to end encrypted) right. I'm not aware of any other project that got this much right, unfortunately.
If only if Tox got more attention, it'd gain developers, donations, and the possibility of getting a proper audit done.
The whole forward secrecy seems to be unresolved still. They have session keys,but other than that there is no rekeying.
And then we have the whole issue with it relying on supernodes for much of its functionality (offline messages, mobile phone client rs) which leads to it having a subset of the issues many have with signal.