Any suggestion that Telegram's cryptography is somehow comparable owing to "half of them Ph.D's in math", or that Signal's extensively-reviewed cryptography is backdoored, is pretty clearly risible.
OTF, meanwhile, funded basically the whole of the privacy-preserving cryptography field, for years (they may still, for all I know); for many years, they were simply throwing money at privacy projects to hire 3rd party auditors, none of whom were at all affiliated with OTF (how I know this is that we participated). People who claim OTF is somehow a snakey USG backdooring enterprise are saying more about themselves than they are about any kind of sophisticated understanding of how crypto software is built.
There is zero compelling reason to believe that signal is uniquely flawed.
Open source vs closed source is not meaningful here.
While there's only one vuln that have been discussed publicly at HN. The only issue is they are in russian as well.
At least one more was exposed[0] by the same person shortly after, i mean days after the initial. Over here[1] the same researcher wonders whether any other flaws exist.
And here's[2] how the self-proclaimed `part time-troll` Pavel Durov (the Telegram CEO) reacts to [1]. To me it's obvious he is being haugty towards HN community with `venerable HN cryptographers`.
To add to his general slandering approach towards competition while handling own product flaws without any transparency and publicity mind his company is now under investigation by SEC[3].
[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
[2] https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=ru&tl=en&u=htt...
[3] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/let-slip-dogs-war-sec-v...
And for the paltry $200k they are offering for breaking it I'd bet you could find a magnitude more with little effort on the grey markets.
But no, absolutely no proof the underlying crypto has been broken. It doesn't need to be when government requests for data stored on their servers does more than enough.
So far, Roskomnadzor has "no urgent request" to include Viber and WhatsApp messengers in the register of organizers and distributors of information. According to Interfax, this was stated by the head of the Department, Alexander Zharov. He was asked when these companies will be included in the register. "We had a stormy substantive dialogue with the telegram messenger," the official recalled. "We are consulting with all other companies on this topic until there is an urgent request to include them in the register."
Maybe gn. Zharov uses whatsapp for chatting with his family and they didn’t like the appearance of mail.ru’s tamtam.chat.
* Group chats can only use the default encryption, not end to end encryption.
* The end to end encrypted chats are tied to a single device, and there's no sync across devices (in contrast, all chats on Wire are end to end encrypted and sync across devices within a limited time period).
The default use cases of almost all users has the chat messages stored in plain text on the Telegram servers. This is one of the reasons search (done on the server side) is quite fast on Telegram.
P.S.: Despite these limitations, I prefer Telegram for its superior UX and for not having metadata shared with Facebook. My wish is that someday Telegram makes E2E the default everywhere.
E: Well, I took a look at the desktop client with wireshark. It appears to just do MTProto on port 443, not TLS. When I use iptables to drop traffic on port 443, it falls back to MTProto over HTTP(!).
They list some alternate transports on their website, but it looks like you need to host them yourself. https://core.telegram.org/mtproto/transports
I reminisce that when Durov was questioned about the abscence of secure connection to the servers, he told it's a too much of overhead and may impact QoS badly.
Some time they rolled out an `always use https` option and buried it deep in the user preferences. Meaning most of non-tech savvy audience kept using the service unaware they are not secure.
The obvious pattern here is they tend to use plain http as a default transport unerminig established security practices.
[0] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
Could you expand on their usage of TLS and HTTP? Surely they don't send anything in plain-text over HTTP?
I thought they used TLS wrapping in some markets for censorship resistance, but apparently that is not the case unless you set up your own proxy.
You of all should know better than to conflate the general concept of encryption with the very nice special case that is end-to-end encryption!
> and 1:1 E2E is disabled by default.
It is not disabled in any way. It just isn't default.
There are really enough real reasons to criticize Telegram, absolutely no reason to 1. redefine words to have narrower definitions 2. Write outright misinformation.
I respect you a whole lot but your somewhat sloppy handling of facts detract a whole lot from the overall image.
When this design flaw came to be known, Telegram released a newer version where the user has more control on who can know that they're on Telegram. With that change, even if you had someone's number in your contacts list, you wouldn't know if/when they join/are available on Telegram unless they choose to make themselves visible.
From my understanding, TOR was created with the intent of hiding US intelligence communications[0]. From my naive understanding, this only works if 1) no one else can back door it (which is critical since it is presumed you're using it to hide from highly technical state actors) 2) there are a sufficient number of users that are not intelligence actors (so you can hide among them. Otherwise you get "Oh, that person connected to a TOR node, let's go pick them up and grab their computer").
Maybe I'm naive, but it seems like the crypto people and the US government have aligned interests here.
> The stated goal of the fund is to promote democracy in developing countries
With an additional alignment of interests, I think many believe that being able to "talk shit" on your leaders is a key part to democracy. And if you're able to do this without fear of your government coming after you (aka: backdoors), then you will freely acknowledge your dissent, find support, and democracy is the likely outcome. I'm not sure if that's true, but I've definitely heard intelligence people suggest that.
So even if it was controlled by the CIA, would this be an issue? It seems like it is actively in their best interest to use real encryption and no backdoors. You don't want all your potential rebels to get caught. You want them to be able to organize out of the eyes of the government that the CIA is trying to overthrow. Having a backdoor just puts a timebomb on it, and one that isn't going to last very long.
Or I guess there's another answer to this. The CIA is pretty fucking dumb. Which is a reasonable answer that I'll accept too, but I think the people working on this stuff would be well aware (since they're probably experts in hacking similarly encrypted systems)
https://support.torproject.org/about/why-is-it-called-tor/
Note: even though it originally came from an acronym,
Tor is not spelled "TOR". Only the first letter is
capitalized. In fact, we can usually spot people
who haven't read any of our website (and have
instead learned everything they know about Tor from
news articles) by the fact that they spell it wrong.
> The encryption of Signal (=WhatsApp, FB) was funded by the US Government. I predict a backdoor will be found there within 5 years from now.
He seems to enjoy throwing out loosly supported accusations. He might be right in some of them, but stopped clocks and so forth.
He's also been accused himself of deliberately sabotaging the security of his own encrypted messenger app (Telegram). There's no real evidence, but he did hire a bunch of math PhDs to figure out encryption from first principles
> The team behind Telegram, led by Nikolai Durov, consists of six ACM champions, half of them Ph.Ds in math. It took them about two years to roll out the current version of MTProto. Names and degrees may indeed not mean as much in some fields as they do in others, but this protocol is the result of thougtful and prolonged work of professionals. [1]
Note: Signal, like TOR, is funded in part by the Open Technology Fund of Radio Free Asia, which is controlled and funded by Congress. So far there has been no public evidence that this funding has come with any malicious strings. The stated goal of the fund is to promote democracy in developing countries, and Signal and TOR are obviously in line with that overt goal. Radio Free Asia used to be a CIA front during the Cold War, but there's been no public evidence that the transfer of control away from the CIA to Congress was in any way a sham.
[0]: https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/18/signal-moxie-marlinspike-t...
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6916860