I’m thinking of the things listed on the Privacy Guides real-time communication section
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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).
They now seem like a honeypot.
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.
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
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.
Let’s not forget that for those looking for alternatives, a key feature of signal is/was its SMS integration.
I use silence, a fork of signal.
- upside: it can still send and receive SMS messages!
- downside: nobody else uses it, so it only does SMS as a result.
The major one that concerns me is who is behind them. Even if we trust that their encryption is not backdoored, there is a lot of information that can be gathered just from the frequency of messages and who they are between.
If it came out that a three letter agency was running one of these networks, it would not suprise me at all.
The US military uses Signal for communication
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I mean, windows is so…
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The difficulty of any non-mainstream chat app is getting other people to use it. On that list, Signal is the most probable to be recognized by people who don’t have a particular interest in privacy, so it’s more likely to get more people to use it.
besides that, and besides the lack of forward secrecy on matrix and session already mentioned by privacy guides, do some of these alternatives have worse security, privacy, or ux than signal in some way?
both have worse UX than Signal. pretty much all except Signal are lacking on this front. OSS developers are allergic to a smooth UX in general
Signals UX is no better than SMS apps. People I’ve tried to convert all say the same thing.
~~But it’s still the most secure/privacy minded messenger. ~~
Signal has read receipts, reactions and typing indicators. That’s 90% of what any messenger needs. It also let’s you schedule texts. I do wish it would do reminders and pinch to resize text though.
Signal’s UX is NOT good unless you want to expose your encrypted conversations to a smartphone (of which far from all can run a private OS). All because of no desktop registration. You either have to use inconvenient signal-cli, or an Android emulator which creates its own troubles.
I’m using Matrix/element. I rather not give my phone number, you see, which is must-have for Signal. I have installed the app in my family’s phones, and they were accepting, so all is well. I don’t need to communicate through private messaging with anybody else, so who cares if others don’t use matrix?
Yeah, about that. https://www.signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
