A truly better signal is one that’s not using a centralized service.
I don’t see an issue as signal is designed not to trust the server. Signal also uses sealed sender and Perfect Forward Secrecy, which is something almost all e2ee messengers lack. What it means in practice is signal leaks very little if any metadata, if you leak metadata you give away details about who your talking to and for how long, etc. Examples might include talking with a suicide hotline, or a doctor, maybe a customer service agent at a company and for how long. Those details will give a lot away about you, even if the messages or calls themselves are encrypted. Matrix is not recommended for communication because it fails to properly hide metadata and actively trusts the servers. When you make a call on signal, as long as both users have “Always Relay Calls” set to disabled, your calls will be peer to peer instead of trusting a central server to facilitate the connection and trusting a middle man. What this means is since the connection is peer to peer you can leak your IP address to the user you’re talking to, however a VPN fixes this issue.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. There are multiple issues with centralization.
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A prime one is that the entity that you (have no choice but to) trust today will eventually turn against you at some point down the road. In the case of Signal, the writing is on the wall already: using a 3rd party client is against Signal’s ToS, and Signal has been seen pushing controversial features like crypto payments that, as a user of their captive ecosystem, you have no choice but to engage with.
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Signal is an entity that’s incorporated in a jurisdiction and might be compelled by law not to provide service for certain users, or to degrade its encryption to comply with the local regulator. Using a centralized service like Signal makes you an easily identifiable/prime target in such a scenario.
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No matter what Signal says, nobody but themselves can verify what code runs on their servers, and what amount of logging/data processing goes there. Because every account checks in through them, because every message is routed through them, there is no technical barrier to knowing who’s who, who’s talking to whom and when, with the nature of the communication (text, video, image, …) from which a lot can be inferred. As far as I understand the American law, any agency could tap into that, either directly, or via Amazon on which the whole thing is running. I am not paranoid enough to believe that 3 letter agencies belong to one’s typical threat model, but with SGX contact discovery from phone number and sealed senders, Signal kindah panders to those? Either way, those are unverifiable mitigations to problems that decentralized systems do not have.
I could go on and on, but the first one is the main one IMO: we are past the need to trust anybody with our instant messaging and put a fundamental aspect of our lives at the mercy of (geo)political and societal woes. That’s practically a solved problem in the opensource world, and we can make it ethical and sustainable by just opting out of the dominative model of monopolistic and centralized systems.
with the nature of the communication (text, video, image, …) from which a lot can be inferred
If the messages are E2EE, the server wouldn’t have access to this information.
A prime one is that the entity that you (have no choice but to) trust today will eventually turn against you at some point down the road.
- How does that change with federation, you always trust someone. Why should I trust the shady person running software on their basement, even if you self host, you are trusting the developers not to ship bad or poorly written code.
using a 3rd party client is against Signal’s ToS
As far as it being against signals tos, molly exists and had not received any problems from the signal foundation to my knowledge, discord has the same clause and they don’t seem to give a rats ass. Sure they could enforce it but they don’t, and personally with how matrix clients are handled they have mixed security, fluffychat has security issues ranging from outdated SDK versions to quite literally ddosing homeservers because of a non-existent rate limit.
pushing controversial features like crypto payments
The crypto stuff wasn’t great but you know what’s cool? You don’t have to use it. Simple as that. You don’t have to engage with it and you and I both know that. It’s buried in settings and you have to find it yourself.
Signal is an entity that’s incorporated in a jurisdiction and might be compelled by law or to degrade its encryption to comply with the local regulator.
- I’ve always used integrity as a metric as to how trustworthy a service is, and in terms of signals e2ee, they’ve never lied about it, it’s been proven in court multiple times not having any data on their users, no government can compel anyone or any company for things they don’t have. Signal had everything to lose by lying about their encryption and nothing to gain, so why would they? Why would any company take a huge chance at a death blow just because? Signal is a non profit so they don’t have any incentive to degrade it, they would be dead tomorrow if they got caught.
Using a centralized service like Signal makes you an easily identifiable/prime target in such a scenario.
Signal is not an anonymity tool, and has never been advertised as such, if you need anonymity, signal is not a good choice. You can make it more anonymous by using a burner phone but that’s a different topic.
No matter what Signal says, nobody but themselves can verify what code runs on their servers
- You can’t really confirm what any software can or cannot do, even if it runs on your system. Open source software is bound to the same principals of code, it will do exactly what you tell it to do, even if it is not intended (a 0-day, bug, etc.). Thousands of people constantly are monitoring the Linux kernel and it is still found to have tons of 0 days baked in due to it running a fuck ton on ring zero. You can’t just inspect code and know exactly what it’s doing, unless it’s a hello world program it gets quite complicated. Verified safety numbers also make sure that no man-in-the-middle attacks can take place, making conversations even more trustworthy and still not trusting any server.
As far as I understand the American law, any agency could tap into that, either directly, or via Amazon on which the whole thing is running.
If everything is encrypted, what could Amazon tap? You do realize sealed sender and PFS take away any trust from the server correct? It’s all encrypted, your aren’t trusting the server at all, it’s completely trust-less, and unless you think Amazon or governments can at this very moment tap any encrypted data and decrypt it, I would recommend taking a walk outside and realize that no one, NO ONE can decrypt current encrypted standards.
Unless you can point me to a reputable article showing in great detail that signal is lying about their e2ee claims then I’ll rest my case. Signal has been proven time and time again to not have any data on their users except the minimum required for the service to work, that’s called integrity.
Also there will always be someone you trust on the internet, nothing will change that unless we completely rethink how the internet works.
Edit: added quotes Edit 2: added extra info
Some interesting thoughts on this from the Signal creator: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
And an objection by the author of a popular XMPP client: https://gultsch.de/objection.html
of a popular XMPP client
10k downloads for a hideous outdated app is popular now?
That’s a good response I hadn’t read before - thanks. Still so relevant 7 years on.
Now if someone could make a desktop app (perhaps using Qt or some similar cross-platform toolkit) that isn’t Electron bloatware, for all the people who don’t have a few spare CPU cores and gigabytes of RAM to spend on a messaging client.
I don’t understand. What makes Molly more trustworthy than Signal, if they both use the same central sever? The website doesn’t really provide much data.
How does that work, though? It’s the same servers and protocols, right? So it would verify with an sms. Or is Molly not compatible with Signal (Molly users talking with Signal users), and I’m just completely misunderstanding the statement of being a hardened Signal?
I had mistaken molly for a different signal fork. Molly just uses an encrypted local db that doesn’t rely solely on the OS encryption method.
I’ve been using Molly on my GrapheneOS phone for about a year. It’s been pretty great so far.
This post once contained a bad take about Signal in service of a not particularly funny gag. It has been removed.
Signal is definitely not compromised. It has and is being reviewed by many cybersecurity professionals and is considered pretty secure. It has some downsides like its use of centralized servers and some metadata leakage but other than that its solid.
So to update your comment:
“Don’t use signal its compromised!”
- The glowies
You’re right, of course. I was in a dark place mentally and was spiralling when I wrote that. I will remove it. In hindsight it wasn’t even that funny.
