I currently use Telegram for my friends and family, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the UK Government is either reaching agreement for backdoors with messaging services, or is trying its hardest to.
I’m also on Element/Matrix. Before I try to get my contacts to join me on there, should I be aware of any privacy issues or is that a good place to head?
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Telegram is the least secure thing there is. Not only it’s complete zero effort security, it’s also much above zero effort to advertise itself as almost secure. Not a good combination as you know.
Telegram is the worst kind of “secure” messaging in that it gives you a false sense of security while not really being secure.
I currently use Telegram for my friends and family
Telegram is probably the worst thing you could use, it doesn’t encrypt messages by default and they are stored on Telegram’s servers, so they can read them at any time.
I’m also on Element/Matrix. Before I try to get my contacts to join me on there, should I be aware of any privacy issues
Yes, Matrix leaks a bunch of metadata and doesn’t have post-quantum encryption.
The best option is to use Signal. It uses end-to-end encryption by default for everything: Normal chats, group chats, voice and video calls and even stories. Messages are only stored on their servers (in encrypted format, so they can’t access them) until you receive them, after which they are promptly deleted and only stored on your device. And Signal has much better metadata protection than Matrix. The UX is also much better and less confusing, making onboarding new users much easier.
But you should also be aware that Signal does not federate, so the company can be bought. They have control over all accounts and the servers, without easy way to migrate away again. So it might just be another trap.
Try to use federated services (like matrix), they are more robust against hostile take overs.
so the company can be bought
The company (Signal Messenger LLC) is fully owned by Signal Foundation, a 501©3 non profit organization.
Try to use federated services
I generally like this idea, and I also use federated services for things like social media, that’s why we’re having a discussion here on Lemmy. But it introduces some issues with private messaging, like lack of reliability, which sucks if you want to use Matrix as your primary messenger, as well as metadata leaks. Federation is not always the answer, and in my opinion definitely not when it comes private and secure messaging.
they are more robust against hostile take overs
Probably around 80-90% of Matrix users are on the matrix.org homeserver, so it’s absolutely not as decentralized and resilient as you think it is.
The company (Signal Messenger LLC) is fully owned by Signal Foundation, a 501©3 non profit organization.
OpenAI is also non-profit. Not really an argument.
Probably around 80-90% of Matrix users are on the matrix.org homeserver, so it’s absolutely not as decentralized and resilient as you think it is.
Well, the goal is that moving to your own server, will not mean that you will loose access to all your contacts. Which makes moving instances much simpler. If Matrix gets a hostile take-over, your don’t really need to reach a critical mass for an alternative server.
This is such a bad take it seems like deliberate misinformation.
Signal is open-source software maintained by a non-profit. User data is not stored on Signal servers, they have no way to access messages as they are stored and encrypted on your phone. If the Signal Foundation were revealed as bad actors then the open-source code could be forked to a new project.
Feel free to fully evaluate their code here: https://github.com/signalapp
That’s the signal app. The software which runs on their servers is proprietary.
No it’s not: https://github.com/signalapp/signal-server
TIL. Was it in the past?
I’m with you on this, I strongly recall there was some sort of not fully open source portion of Signal at least at one point in time.
Edit: ya, they weren’t updating server for awhile, so while there is an open source server, they definitely weren’t running that code for awhile, and may not be running it today. Granted since the decryption happens client side, it shouldn’t matter what the server does to some extent.
There was a period where they didn’t push changes to the repo, but all the code was released afterwards and it’s been getting regular updates ever since. But it also doesn’t matter at all, since the Signal client is designed in a way that avoids putting trust in the server. Signal servers could literally be run by the NSA and it wouldn’t matter, as everything is fully end-to-end encrypted, including metadata. The Signal protocol was also updated to use post-quantum cryptography in 2023.
No, the server is on the github account linked above as well. The repo is here.
Signal however doesn’t federate and does not generally support third-party clients.
At least (to my knowledge) the Signal messages are decrypted on the client end, so buying the company doesn’t give them automatic access to messages.
Having said that, I’m sure a hostile new owner could update the app to decrypt and then send the messages as plaintext to the servers if they wanted…
Well, you can still insert client side decryption into the app.
But it isn’t really about the messages, it is about the control of the servers and the accounts. You cannot easily move away from their servers, because you will lose your contacts. This gives the people controlling the servers power over you. A sort of vendor lockin.
Well, you can still insert client side decryption into the app.
That’s why all clients are fully open-source. You can also use a fork like Molly.
AFAIK, Signal does not want anyone to use alternative clients, has that changed?
As far as I know moxie, signals lead dev, considers only the use of the officially build and distributed client authorized to use their servers.
So if they ever manage to detect someone using their services with an alternative client, they might delete your account.
As far as I know moxie, signals lead dev, considers only the use of the officially build and distributed client authorized to use their servers.
Moxie has resigned a few years ago. The article you linked to is 9 years old, Signal leadership has changed a bunch of times since. Signal can’t detect that you’re running an alternative client, because that check would require them to include some new code in the official client. Even if they did this, they couldn’t just ban anyone who’s client doesn’t pass the check, since it could just be an older version of the official client. They could force everyone to use the official app, but they really have no reason to invest time and effort into enforcing this. Molly is only available for Android, and it isn’t even on the Play Store or the official F-Droid repo, so the user base naturally won’t be as big.
In the 1990s US ISPs would “give you” an e-mail account with their service: [email protected]. Of course, this is insta-lockin for that e-mail address, you can never port it.
Owning your own domain name and running e-mail service through that worked, for a few years, but the big players have made whitelist / blacklist such a frustrating whack-a-mole game in the e-mail space that running your own e-mail server quickly became impractical.
There are different degrees of vendor lock in. If you use email (or Matrix) with a domain, you have no control over, you are soft-locked it. You can buy a domain, self-host or pay for a managed service and inform everyone that you are now reachable over some other address, but nobody else has to change.
If you use Signal (or Discord or whatever) and want to switch to a different domain. You cannot. If you switch to a different protocol, everyone in your contacts has to switch as well, or you lose that contact. The network effect forces you into the service of one provider. The only way out of there would be if the service get so bad, that a critical mass leaves, but you will have to deal with that bad service all the way.
As long as financial interest are there, non-federated services will sooner or later start to enshittyfy. So if you choose a communication medium, choose something that leaves your options open. If you don’t like Matrix, try XMPP, it has come a long way as well.
This was outlined 50 years ago as part of Anarchist analysis of the system then. Not exactly an easy read, but “the second watershed” can be equated to “jumping the shark” or “enshittification” or whatever other term you want to apply to: a good thing gone bad due to the business owners switching from serving customers to enriching / empowering themselves:
https://archive.org/details/illich-conviviality/page/9/mode/1up
The alternative proposed by Illich to “Radical Monopolies” are “Convivial Tools” which empower individuals instead of central decision makers.
Shortcut question: What’s a workable federated e2ee solution that’s available today? Quantum secure? Metadata secure?
Matrix?
IMO the whole “metadata insecurity” stuff about Matrix is over exaggerated. Also Matrix is improving there.
If metadata security is really that important, you could try Tox or similar P2P chats.
I actually tried Tox - maybe 8 years ago now… the real problem with it, or anything similar, is that you need both ends of every conversation to take the trouble to set it up. It was pretty easy to setup, IMO, but… as an example, in 2005 I had an engineer co-worker ask me about “that Linux thing” when I got around to telling him that pretty much everything he used on a daily basis was available in Linux, just under different names than he was used to in Windows “Oh, you mean I’d have to learn different names for Word and Excel and Outlook?” “Uh, yeah.” “Oh, that’s more trouble than I think I want, I’ll just stick with what I know.”
I’ve honestly found signal better than matrix.
Matrix is just not there yet in terms of features UI etc and is less private than signal because it collects way more metadata and stuff. I know the idea of federation is cool, but Signal works better for the privacy aspect.
I’m using simplex :3
Interesting—I feel like I see Matrix touted as more private than Signal b/c of Signal’s phone number requirement. What compromising metadata does Matrix require that Signal does not?
Sorry I’ll let someone more knowledgeable answer about metadata, but signal does allow you to set a username and hide your phone number (so people add you with username instead if f number)
The downside of Signal is that it’s centralized, and thus at the whim of those who run it. Structurally, it’s not really different from Whatsapp or Telegram except for who owns it.
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison, simply because their structures are quite different. Signal is FOSS run by a 501©3 non-profit, whereas Whatsapp is obviously run by Meta and data mines its users; Telegram is also a nonprofit, but privacy was never their goal or mission.
They’re all centralized, which I agree is a negative, but if something must be centralized, being run by a nonprofit foundation whose mission is privacy and E2EE is about the best option you could hope for in that scenario.
Like openai and proton?
We are still in a trust me bro situation… We just trust signal bro more than meta bro.
Sorta like those. Anybody that thought OpenAI was trustworthy just by virtue of being a nonprofit gets what they deserve for being so credulous, and Proton isn’t directly comparable, because it’s a stack of software, not just one. You would have to compare the analog of Signal, and Proton doesn’t have one.
If what you really want to say is that we don’t know with 100% certainty that the Signal Foundation is operating in good faith, then I agree, though they seem to have a pretty decent track record thus far.
However, that doesn’t mean their software doesn’t do what is expected (it’s FOSS, go inspect and build it yourself), and E2EE ensures that even if they suddenly wanted or were ordered to turn anything over, the data LEOs get would be limited, if it exists at all.
We are still in a trust me bro situation… We just trust signal bro more than meta bro.
I’m not sure what you think is especially noteworthy here. It’s always some level of a “trust me bro” situation. That’s how the internet works. If you want to avoid trust issues, stop using the internet.
Iirc Proton has been audited for security and for privacy as well.
We have systems in place to help with it
We are still in a trust me bro situation
No we’re not. You don’t have to trust Signal, everything is open source, you can actually verify it.
There should be a difference between using Whatsapp while in a county with good privacy laws (like one of the EU member) or one without.
As far as I know Meta only collects and abuses data it get’s from people where there are now laws in place to prevent it (so why wouldn’t they do it).
We should normalise the audits on security and privacy that are done by proper accountants. It doesn’t help that a lot of people call bookkeepers accountants which isn’t correct, but a signature from an accountant (CPA/AA/RA or whatever) should have some impact to prove the services are secure or private.
As far as I know Meta only collects and abuses data it get’s from people where there are now laws in place to prevent it (so why wouldn’t they do it).
Unfortunately, in practice, the laws don’t seem to mean much to the wealthy.
Like other gigantic companies that have billions of dollars, it’s easier and more profitable to ask forgiveness than permission; paying legal fines that are 0.01% of their overall profits is just the cost of doing business. Zuck has been caught on multiple occasions skirting the law (see the most recent revelation of them surreptitiously leeching scores of books from Anna’s Archive and a previous one of partnering with Cambridge Analytica, for example).
I’m all good with having companies submit to hostile financial audits, but I’m not sure how a CPA would be qualified to validate security or privacy. Code security audits should be done by cryptographic experts, and I think you would need both.
Perhaps one day, we’ll have Certified Public Cryptographers that have a fiduciary duty to ensure people are secure or private.
A CPA is required to higher other professionals when their knowledge doesnt reach to the subject in question, so yeah they would get a security or privacy specialist to help them. The upside of using a CPA is that they would look at the entire process. The rapport of a CPA is going to be a lot more expensive though.
In the US people defend that companies don’t publish their annual reports, plus some people also defend these companies regardless of what they do. It’s almost religion. But if you would require companies to at least publish some figures and require bigger companies to have a statement signet by a CPA then more of these companies would have issues. Since a CPA can generally get in a lot of trouble if they mess up (at least here in NL)
They don’t need to be hostile audit’s, heck that’s probably the worst way of doing it. Work together with the company and help them to pass the audit and they will be more transparent .
Sounds like we want the same thing, except I think it’s perhaps too high of an expectation to have a CPA that can do both financial accounting and cryptography.
A CPA is required to use experts in fields to they are no expert in, but the proces part of the entire situation is very import as well so that’s why I suggested a CPA do it. (Plus a signature from a CPA means more)
it’s not really different from Whatsapp or Telegram
That’s not true. WhatsApp is fully proprietary and Telegram doesn’t use E2EE by default. And even if you enable it, they use a weak encryption protocol.
telegram is not encrypted e2e
Matrix is good for private general messaging. The fact that it’s decentralised means it can also withstand things like government-ordered shutdowns or back doors, since there is no central point that controls the whole network.
Two things to be aware of:
- Some non-message bits (e.g. room topic text and membership) have not yet been moved to the encrypted channel, so those could be read by the administrator of a homeserver that participates in your chat room. Since most people care primarily about keeping the message content private, this is an acceptable trade-off to get all the things that Matrix offers.
- The upcoming Matrix 2.0 features and design choices simplify the UI and fix some occasional errors. It might be worth waiting until this stuff officially lands in the client apps before bringing your contacts to Matrix, for a better experience all around.
As long as you onboard them with the ElementX/SchildichatNext(better fork of element) mobile client, their experience and setup should be fairly future proof. Its still changing and growing for sure but the most important stuff is finally working now and the new call systems is a huge improvement.
But yeah if you want zero metadata, your only choice is P2P stuff like Briar.
Government-ordered shutdowns do not work the way you think. Government doesn’t play by the rules, it makes rules for itself.
Which means - they may, say, make a list of instances updated hourly, which automatically get blocked by ISPs.
Free speech or not, it won’t withstand such.
Note that I said the network can withstand such things, not that it guarantees your connectivity to it when using a hostile ISP. No internet messaging service can do that.
Are there any other messaging options that are more resistant to government ordered shutdowns than Matrix?
There are a few messaging systems that don’t rely on internet service. That usually means a peer-to-peer design using some form of radio link, which can work well for local gatherings (like protests), but these tend to be impractical for general use.
Gotcha, so in summary, anything that relies on an internet service, such as Signal, Matrix, or Simplex, is vulnerable to government ordered blocks via black list that ISPs are compelled to enforce. Am I thinking of this right?
Thankfully, it’s not that simple.
A centralised service is an easy target for a government. (This is where Signal stands.) A decentralised one is significantly harder, because the government would have to be constantly discovering and processing every node in the network as new ones appear. (This is where Matrix stands, although it doesn’t have many public servers yet.) Fully peer-to-peer decentralisation makes it harder still, because there are as many nodes as there are users, with network addresses that often change. (Some of these exist today, but are mostly experimental with few users. Matrix has done some proof-of-concept work in this area as well.)
On top of decentralisation, tunnels like VPN and Tor can be helpful in avoiding ISP-imposed blocks.
Something p2p like Tox or Briar, both annoying for daily use.
All either lack user directory or use phone numbers as identifiers. Finding people through the same instrument is an important functionality, without which a messaging system will not be popular and thus will not be relevant for such situations.
If a messaging system uses SMS for confirmation, then, as you might guess, there is some central point sending out those SMS. So it would have centralized registration. Then technically registration can be disrupted (one can imagine some cryptographic scheme to make this the only disruption). Registration is an important part, even for a popular system many people will not have an existing account when they need it.
User directories - if there is a decentralized user directory listing John Smith, Ivan Ivanov and Obi-Wan Kenobi, then either there will be hundreds of each with no ability to tell which of them is the real one (suppose those names are unique, say, u://jsmith, u://iivanov and u://alongtime ), or you need some kind of registration of public key and nickname pairs. Simplest variant (maybe dumb) is to have the messages telling of such registration having happened to be signed by some “registration authority” or a user delegated (by another message) that right (one would have to trace it to the root sadly). Then, it appears, users may add registration authorities, or choose between them, manually, but then the decentralized user directory would work in some moderated and ordered way.
I’m not aware of any such system existing, and perhaps something about what I wrote is just dumb.
I currently use Telegram for my friends and family, but have reluctantly come to the conclusion that the UK Government is either reaching agreement for backdoors with messaging services, or is trying its hardest to.
Unless you start an encrypted chat, Telegram chats are not E2E.
I’m also on Element/Matrix. Before I try to get my contacts to join me on there, should I be aware of any privacy issues or is that a good place to head?
Host your own Matrix node, and then you don’t have to worry about prying eyes. Realistically, instead of worrying about the protocol, worry about the content of the text. Use PGP to encrypt your own text and send it over clearnet. Who cares at that point.
Definitely host your own node! It’s trivial for a server admin to add a hidden bot to every chat and while it’s still E2EE, an unknown party could still have a copy and key to read it.
Really good talk from DEFCON 32 about the service “Anom” by Joseph Cox (sorry for the lack of a link, at lunch, on mobile and about to get back to work).
I think at this point it would be funnier to just use something obviously unsecure like discord but share your public key with the other user and then send encrypted text.
We went full circle to the early 2000s, slapping PGP on top of public messaging platforms!
I guess a vencord plugin for that wouldn’t be that difficult to do
I used to do something like this before Signal became a thing. We used to use OTR via the Pidgin OTR plugin to send encrypted messages over Google Hangouts. Funnily enough, I’m pretty sure Pidgin supports Discord, so you could use the exact same setup to achieve what you described.
It was pretty funny to check the official Hangouts web client and see nonsensical text being sent.
No proprietary software can truley provide secure messaging
Matrix is not proprietary. The protocol is FOSS, Synapse server is FOSS, Dendrite server is FOSS, there are FOSS clients, Element is FOSS too afaik.
can confirm, element is foss
You may want SimpleX. You can still self-host your own server if you wish, but it doesn’t have nearly the metadata issues of matrix and encryption keys are stored in a database that you back up instead of constantly breaking
Last time I tried Simplex, the desktop app was incompatible with the mobile app. Do you know whether this has been fixed?
I haven’t personally tried it, but I think there’s a setting in the mobile app for using it with a desktop. So I assume it is fixed, but I won’t swear to it.
It works. You either have to link it with your mobile app or you use it standalone with a different user/id
The most privacy focused messaging app I know is SimpleX Chat, it has no user IDs, is FOSS, e2e encrypted with an option to use TOR, give it a try!
+1 for SimpleX
Simplex was bubbling about implementing CSAM. Any client mentioning it is not safe, period… Child safety and hate speech is always an excuse for tolitarian regimes ( sittenpolizei ) never a true approach for solving the issue ( child safety )
I have no idea about this, but as of now anyone can register.
For reference, CSAM is Belgium’s government portal and a system of login, as far as I know, so I assume it would be used to check if someone is a minor at the time of registration
Child safety is important but implementing this would kind of defeat the purpose of a privacy focused app.
I agree that just gatekeeping children and therefore verifying everyone with a government platform, but then it raises the question on how to improve child safety on an app that’s self-hostable with not even user IDs to identify the users?
I don’t have an answer to that, but I don’t like just saying “This solution is bad”, I always try to add “So try this instead, because XXX”
hello beautiful people of lemmy I’m excited to make my first comment in here
so I wanted to ask: considering that WhatsApp is a big threat to privacy and even worse because of google and iOS backups, how big of an improvement would it be not using it and using the secret chat option in telegram instead? That would solve the issue wouldn’t it? As far as I know the concern is with normal non encrypted conversations and the groups channels and all those.
I would love to use signal with everyone but where I live it seems that there is 0 worries about the topic so I only use it with my more “international” people. The most I can get is probably to use telegram E2EE.
Hello and welcome to the Fediverse.
Telegram’s secret chat’s encryption algorithm is made by Telegram themselves, which is already a red flag. You generally don’t want to roll out your own encryption algorithm if you aren’t cryptographers, which Telegram people aren’t. Their MTProto is also not proven, so you’d rather not want to use it.
Here’s a blog entry about their MTProto: https://web.archive.org/web/20180420061726/http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-back-we-know-maths/
The two encrypted messaging platforms I currently suggest are XMPP or Matrix. Both are usually fine and are decentralized. The main thing with them is to either self-host or choose a server you trust to set up an account — which applies to the Fediverse in general.
Out of curiosity, is there anything stopping you from suggesting SimpleX? How does SimpleX compare to XMPP or Matrix?
Mostly just that it’s still pretty new and thus hasn’t been as polished or scrutinized yet. Haven’t tried it myself. For the sake of the OP’s question, it may also be notable that it’s a UK company.
My response to the body of this post is https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/
This might address the URL of this post (I’ve never interacted with “iCloud” so I don’t necessarily know what would be a good replacement for it): https://www.privacyguides.org/en/document-collaboration/
I’ve heard good things about simplex give it a look
