ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)
@khm @kunev @mcc That's not really fair considering the costs that Session paid (they got rid of PFS, for example) and Session is...about to die in < 90 days.
Signal, meanwhile, literally has the gold standard of encryption and is designed so that we largely don't have to trust the server.
Federation is nice because of the properties it brings, but it also has trade-offs. Sometimes, those trade-offs don't always make sense or the benefits are overridden by the costs.
1/2
Soatok Dreamseeker
@x_cli @chiraag @khm @kunev @mcc What a remarkably lazy argument to make.
You are correct that part 1 of an 8-part series does not mention metadata, but https://soatok.blog/signal-crypto-review-2025-part-8/ sure as shit does.
Alyx ⏚
@chiraag Sure. I also work in the applied cryptography engineering field, but you can trust whoever you like. As it happens, @soatok does not speak about metadata in his blog post. Not once. The word is not even present, and that's all I am talking about, so his claims and mine's are not contradictory.
My feeling about why the Signal president is not in jail right now, considering what we know about the metadata that Signal does have, is that they are actively collaborating with the USA government. Another possibility is that the DoJ is utterly stupid.
If you had watched the video, you would know that I'm talking about AWS, Cloudfront, Cloudflare, GCP and Apple which are all involved in the operation of the Signal service.
@khm @kunev @mcc
ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)
@khm @kunev @mcc Signal, for all of its flaws (and I definitely count centralized among those flaws, along with requiring a phone number), is a good app. It largely works, protects my information, doesn't collect shit, is open source, and takes on the big guys with way less funding. Maybe let's not shit on the one messaging app to take on vastly shittier alternatives and actually *succeed* (to some extent) with normies?
2/2
Alyx ⏚
I'm gonna break your high opinion of Signal, sorry.
Signal can and do collect a lot of shit. A lot more than what they pretend they have. I have no idea why the USA authorities put up with their incomplete responses. I have theories.
Signal subcontractors do collect shit and they make no privacy promises at all. There are a lot of them. All USA-based
Signal servers can disable privacy features and the Signal app will comply silently.
ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)
@x_cli @khm @kunev @mcc I'm going to trust cryptographers on this one:
https://soatok.blog/2025/02/18/reviewing-the-cryptography-used-by-signal/
Also, if they routinely lied about what metadata they had, they would literally go to jail. So maybe they're not lying? I also don't know which subcontractors you're talking about.
Soatok Dreamseeker
@x_cli @chiraag @khm @kunev @mcc
Having stuff (like contacts) in the secure enclave is great, but secure enclaves don't have storage, so when you need to restart the task running in the enclave, either you loose all the data, or you store it on disk in an encrypted form to load it back in in the new task. Where is the encryption key for that data?
Burned into the Silicon, if you take SGX at face value.
Alyx ⏚
@soatok I have read your series :) What I am saying is that, unless I don't recall it correctly, your focus is not on what metadata is available to Signal servers.
For operation purposes, they necessarily have more data than what they claim (i.e. just the phone number, the IP address of the last connection, date of creation and date of last connection).
They have the remaining prekeys from which you can infer when/how many new conversations were created.
Having stuff (like contacts) in the secure enclave is great, but secure enclaves don't have storage, so when you need to restart the task running in the enclave, either you loose all the data, or you store it on disk in an encrypted form to load it back in in the new task. Where is the encryption key for that data? It has to be known by the operators, unless I am mistaken, and if that key is known by the operator, they can decrypt the data on disk.... so the data ain't really secure from the operator and the DoJ?
Signal has to store a token per account to request notification from the Google/Apple notification services. This token is tied to the Signal identity and to a Google/Apple account, so that's something that authorities would want to have, isn't it?
And these are a sample of the data that Signal has to have. I'm not even talking about the data they claim they don't collect and for which we can just blinding trust them.
So yeah, maybe my reply was lazy. But I did publish a conference that required significant work. Let's not ignore that, please.
Soatok Dreamseeker
@x_cli @chiraag @khm @kunev @mcc That said, I recommend talking to the @trailofbits crypto folks if you want to dive into TEE hell. I don't claim to be an expert on that stuff.
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