> Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content.

The fact that anybody can verify keys raises the stakes of attempting a MITM attack significantly and thus protects the majority that doesn't verify keys themselves.

Sure it is a good feature to have, but this sort of attack is going to be targeted. You don't do it to everyone. In the unlikely event you do get caught then you can act dumb in almost all cases. Blame Pegasus or whatever...

I have no illusions about being able to keep a nation state attacker off my devices, but not having all of my correspondence shared with all kinds of third parties by default sure feels nice.

Don't forget anonymity with temporary/throwaway devices and handles combined with E2EE PFS protocols can be very powerful to thwart such surveillance.

Except that if your target finds out, it would undoubtedly increase their paranoia level, making future attacks against him harder and compromising future operations. There's a reason why law enforcement keeps wiretap warrants sealed.

> Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system.

Even my tech-illiterate mother asked if I was hacked or just got a new phone (I got a new phone). The study you link is from 2018, I think it's not a bad assumption to say that people have had some education since then. In 2018 I just started using Signal, nowadays everybody is on it, in my various circles.

strong second.

literally no one cares for the 'secret key of x has changed' on whatsapp, so i might as well enjoy the supperior useability of telegram.

One day I'll write a post about how NL police busted Ironchat and how I discovered their MitM...

> Pretty much no one does any sort of identity verification anyway on any E2EE messaging system. So that means that the people running the servers can MITM if they feel like it to get the content.

Signal makes some cruddy decisions that makes identity verification happen way more often than necessary. Keybase did it better, too bad Zoom bought them just to kill them. Here's their blog post: https://keybase.io/blog/chat-apps-softer-than-tofu . TL;DR:

> Is there a good solution, one that doesn't involve trusting servers with private keys? At Keybase, we think yes: true multi-device support. This means that you control a chain of devices, which are you. When you get a new device (a phone, a laptop, a desktop, an iPad, etc.), it generates its own key pair, and your previous device signs it in. If you lose a device, you "remove" it from one of your remaining devices. Technically this removal is a revocation, and there's also some key rotation that happens automatically in this case.

> The net result is that you don't need to trust the server or meet in person when a partner or teammate gets a new device. Similarly, you don't need to trust the server or meet in person when they remove a device, unless it was their last. The only time you need to see a warning is when someone truly loses access to all their installs. And in that case, you're met with a serious warning, the way it should be:

The problem is that these messengers don't encourage it. People are more likely to do verification if the app has an inbuilt process giving visual incentives for verification, see Element and Threema.