You shouldn't share state secrets with the US. They will be on or transferred between misconfigured cloud accounts. Some agency will eventually get authorization for analysis of them with an intention of financial espionage. The probable or confirmed loss of them will serve as a plausible deniability for the US when it misuses them.
It is clear there is a gap between how people imagine this works, or should work in theory, and how it actually works.
Because competence is a disqualifying attribute in the kakistocracy known as the Republican Party.
For lunch orders and office softball schedules. Not top secret information.
Right, but this is nothing new: Hegseth is only a recent example of Trump's camp mishandling sensitive docs; I'll bet there's been an inner secret Four Eyes group since the the Mar-a-Lago bathroom official-document-archive story dropped years ago.
What surprises me is that I expected Tulsi Gabbard to be the centre of mishandling allegations, not SecDef.
Tulsi is by all appearances more experienced in operating under the radar. That said, I’m sure she won’t disappoint.
Also, to be clear, Signal doesn't use public-key cryptography in the naive way (i.e. to encrypt/decrypt messages) as was/is possible with RSA. It uses asymmetric key pairs to first do a Diffie-Hellman key exchange, i.e. generate ephemeral symmetric keys, which are then used for encryption/decryption. This then also guarantees forward secrecy, see https://signal.org/blog/asynchronous-security/ . (Add to that they incorporate an additional post-quantum cryptographic scheme these days, and I'm probably omitting a lot of other details.)
Maybe it’s the servers that is the problem.
The encryption probably won't be owned up to the point where it is practical to decrypt traffic in bulk, but it's a valid thing to look at.
Note that this is what we are discussing in the above messages, not the "strength" of Signal's encryption. I get that it is largely hypothetical risk, but it's a real difference.
For their use case, which requires communication between two (or more) arbitrary users who never communicated before among millions of users, running on cheap commodity hardware over wireless connectivity to the internet.
Leaving encryption aside, looking only at the network level, the DoD is capable of using a dedicated fiber line. Or rather a parallel fiber infrastructure.
Is this device using DoD PKI [0]?
If not, then how is DoD managing access to it? Or is there a post-it with a local password stuck to it?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Access_Card#Integrate...
Edit: I didn't state something perhaps I should have. Symmetric key is considered more secure because public key is more complicated so more room for side channel mistakes, and the computation needes to break public keys doesn't scale as fast with key size. I am not an expert but that is what I've read.
Forcing the reader to parse thru the literary devices in order to get to the argument weakens the argument.
Approximately 30,000 people go to work in the Pentagon every day. There are areas in the building that are SCIFs and they don't allow cell phones and laptops. But the majority of the building is an office building used for office building type stuff. Employees and contractors bring their personal cellphones and mobile devices in there every day.
About a month ago there was a discussion here saying Signal is preinstalled and widely used at the CIA.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43478091
It's also recommended by the government's cybersecurity agency CISA.
https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mo...
Oddly they have thought of that already, to the point all encryption systems in use in the gov are thought of in these terms.
All that matters are the different assumed times to publication (weeks to years), and then treating the strength of measures involved differently based on what is reasonable for the given use.
If you absolutely need something to never be published then encryption isn't the solution, and nor are computers generally.
Famous last words
Obviously using signal here is a terrible opsec failure, I'm just not sure how what you are saying changes anything
"A one-time pad (OTP) is considered theoretically the most secure method of communication — when it’s implemented correctly. That means: 1. The key (pad) is truly random. 2. The key is at least as long as the message. 3. The key is used only once. 4. The key is securely shared in advance and kept completely secret.
When all these conditions are met, a one-time pad provides perfect secrecy — an eavesdropper cannot learn anything about the message, even with infinite computing power."
Distribute a bunch of physical artifacts (smartcards) across the globe; guard a central facility (a symmetric key exchange center) extremely well etc.
The military can also afford to run its (encrypted or plaintext) communications over infrastructure it fully controls. The same isn't true for a service provided out of public clouds, on the public Internet.
The reason why the policies restrict access to government systems isn’t because anyone thinks that those systems are magically immune to security bugs, but that there are entire teams of actually-qualified professionals monitoring them and proactively securing them. His phone is at risk to, say, a dodgy SMS/MMS message sent by anyone in the world who can get his number, potentially not needing more than a commercial spyware license, but his classified computer on a secure network can’t even receive traffic from them, has locked down configuration, and is monitored so a compromise would be detected a lot faster.
That larger context is what really matters. What they’re doing is like the owner of a bank giving his drunken golf buddy the job of running the business, and the first thing he does is start storing the ledger in his car because it’s more convenient. Even if he’s totally innocent and trying to do a good job, it’s just so much extra risk he’s not prepared to handle for no benefit to anyone else.
I assume he copy pasted the message on his unsecured device.
How many apps had access to that text in his clipboard?
To me this isn't a technical problem with Signal, it's an opsec problem, and that's quite a lot harder to explain to people.
Surely they don't have iCloud on their devices though...
Too deep. The problem is the physical environment, the room in which the machine displays the information. Computer and technological security means nothing if the information is displayed on a screen is in a room where anyone with a camera can snap a pic at any time.
At least in the case of the leak the culprit was the UX, no?
Suppose a user wants the following reasonable features (as was the case here):
1. Messages to one's contacts and groups of contacts should be secure and private from outside eavesdroppers, always.
2. Particular groups should only ever contain a specific subset contacts.
With Signal, the user can easily make them common mistake of attempting to add a contact who already is in the group. But in this case Signal UI autosuggested a new contact, displaying initials for that new contact which are the same initials as a current group member.
Now the user has unwittingly added another member to the group.
Note in the case of the leak that the contact was a bona fide contact-- it's just that the user didn't want that particular contact in that particular group. IIRC Signal has no way to know which contacts are allowed to join certain groups.
I don't know much about DoD security. But I'm going to guess no journalist has ever been invited to access a SCIF because they have the same initials as a Defense Dept. employee.
1. Journalist emailed trusted user seeking comment on something. This email contained the journalist's cell phone number in the signature block.
2. The trusted user forwarded this email to the fool with Signal.
3. The fool's iPhone suggested adding the journalist's cell phone number to the trusted user's contact.
4. The fool accepted this, perhaps blindly.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43601213
This iPhone feature exists probably to save a few taps when people text you their new phone number.
But it fails to account for the fact that this is not the only reason phone numbers happen to be in texts.
That's not the threat model. The threat model is that Signal is a tiny LLC making an app on behalf of a foundation and open source software project. It's a small group of human beings.
Small groups of human beings can be coerced or exploited by state-level actors in lots of ways that can't feasibly be prevented. I mean, if someone walks up to you and offers $2M (or blackmails you with whatever they found in your OneDrive, etc...[1]) to look the other way while you hand them your laptop, are you really going to say no to that keylogger? Would everyone?
At scale, there are auditing techniques to address this. The admins at e.g. github are (hopefully) not as vulnerable. But Signal is too small.
[1] Edit: Or, because let's be honest that's the scale we're playing at: straight up threatens to Novichok you or your family.
You and I know that. So do the adversaries. The biggest issue for them is going to be not tripping over the intelligence collecting agencies (or corps) already on their devices.
Public key encryption, like Signal uses, offers good security for most purposes. e.g. It's fantastic for credit card transactions. The problem with using it for transmitting state secrets is that you can't rely on it for long-term secrecy. Even if you avoid MITM or other attacks, a message sent via Signal today could be archived in ciphertext and attacked ten years from now with the hardware/algorithms of ten years in the future. Maybe Signal's encryption will remain strong in ten years. Maybe it will be trivial to crack. If the secrets contained in that message are still sensitive ten years from now, you have a problem.
Anything sent with Signal needs to be treated as published with an unknown delay. If you're sharing intelligence with the U.S., you probably shouldn't find that acceptable.