Signal isn’t federated. Signal has centralized servers. Signal requires phone number identification to use it. Signal stores your encryption key on their servers… Relying on sgx enclaves to ‘protrct’ your encryption key.
Signal can go down. Signal knows who you talk to, just by message timing. Signal knows how frequently you talk to someone. Signal can decrypt your traffic by attack their own sgx enclaves and extracting your encryption key.
These are all possible threats and capabilities. You have to decide what tradeoff makes sense to you. Fwiw I still use signal.
I just read the post (you linked) by signal. Note the use of the word “plaintext”.
we don’t have a plaintext record of your contacts, social graph, profile name, location, group memberships, groups titles, group avatars, group attributes, or who is messaging whom.
Whenever someone qualifies a statement like this, without clarifying, it’s clear they’re trying to obfuscate something.
I don’t need to dig into the technical details to know it’s not as secure as they like to present themselves.
Thanks. I didn’t realize they were so disingenuous. This also explains why they stopped supporting SMS - it didn’t transit their servers (they’d have to add code to capture SMS, which people would notice).
Saying something has the capabilities of a honeypot, is the correct thing to do when we’re assessing our threat model.
Is it a honey pot? I don’t know. It’s unknowable. We have to acknowledge the the actual capabilities of the software as written and the data flows and the organizational realities.
They have your key In a SGX enclave. You only need to look at the rich history of side channel attacks, known SGX critical vulnerabilities, or just the fact that Intel can sign arbitrary code, which can run in the enclave, which means they can be compelled to with the cooperation of the government
I’m not saying they do, but they have the capability, which needs to be accounted for in your threat model.
At the end of the day, people are entrusting their encryption keys with the signal foundation to be stored in the cloud. That needs to be part of the threat model.
Signal isn’t federated. Signal has centralized servers. Signal requires phone number identification to use it. Signal stores your encryption key on their servers… Relying on sgx enclaves to ‘protrct’ your encryption key.
Signal can go down. Signal knows who you talk to, just by message timing. Signal knows how frequently you talk to someone. Signal can decrypt your traffic by attack their own sgx enclaves and extracting your encryption key.
These are all possible threats and capabilities. You have to decide what tradeoff makes sense to you. Fwiw I still use signal.
I just read the post (you linked) by signal. Note the use of the word “plaintext”.
Whenever someone qualifies a statement like this, without clarifying, it’s clear they’re trying to obfuscate something.
I don’t need to dig into the technical details to know it’s not as secure as they like to present themselves.
Thanks. I didn’t realize they were so disingenuous. This also explains why they stopped supporting SMS - it didn’t transit their servers (they’d have to add code to capture SMS, which people would notice).
They now seem like a honeypot.
They are very much not. Anyone who tells you this is a state influencer or someone who believed a state influencer.
Saying something has the capabilities of a honeypot, is the correct thing to do when we’re assessing our threat model.
Is it a honey pot? I don’t know. It’s unknowable. We have to acknowledge the the actual capabilities of the software as written and the data flows and the organizational realities.
excuse me what? signal can extract your encryption key how exactly?
They have your key In a SGX enclave. You only need to look at the rich history of side channel attacks, known SGX critical vulnerabilities, or just the fact that Intel can sign arbitrary code, which can run in the enclave, which means they can be compelled to with the cooperation of the government
https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3456631
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/search/results?form_type=Basic&results_type=overview&query=SGX&search_type=all&isCpeNameSearch=false
I’m not saying they do, but they have the capability, which needs to be accounted for in your threat model.
At the end of the day, people are entrusting their encryption keys with the signal foundation to be stored in the cloud. That needs to be part of the threat model.
Signal is still secure. If it wasn’t it wouldn’t be used in Military applications.
Secure within the context of a certain threat model.
The French government does not endorse signal for government communication as an example
And I would highly suspect the Russian government would not use signal either.
I cite both of these as examples of threat models that can’t ignore some of the potential capability of the signal.