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.
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.
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.
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.
Unfortunately this is not enough. A malicious Signal server can mount a timing correlation attack and infer the social graph of an user. Having a centralized server makes it more difficult to mitigate such risk.
Yes and no. decentralization is great for a lot of reasons but it does come with downsides. I don’t know about you, but i convinced my family and friends to use and keep Signal for years now and i don’t think i would have had such luck with Matrix/Element, let alone a p2p app.
I’m glad decentralized options exist and think they deserve more funding and love, however.
And since that time, XMPP has improved significantly (more integrated with other protocols, more efficient client and server implementations, bridges from and to activitypub, more approachable, easier to self-host…), but Signal.looks to have … stagnated? Well… the crypto payments/web3 shady stuff aside :)
FYI that’s an app that’s used by the German police and in several other “sensitive” contexts where users won’t just pull it from the play store :) ISIS even had their own fork at a point.
He is dodgy af. Doesn’t want any Signal forks (Molly being the only one tolerated) and won’t let them connect to the server. That’s why the open source version LibreSignal was shut down. He also doesn’t want Signal to be on F-Droid, a store which only allows 100% free/open source software.
Take everything coming out of his mouth with a grain of salt.
Totally agreed the project’s actions against the community are shit.
From a LibreSignal issue:
I understand that federation and defined protocols that third parties can develop clients for are great and important ideas, but unfortunately they no longer have a place in the modern world.
This sounds like a jaded, cynical individual.
It’s hilarious, sad, probably even delusional.
How do they think the Internet and their operating systems work in this “modern world”? Magic fairy dust? It’s difficult, thankless work put in by loads of people around the world despite enormous commercial pressure to do otherwise. Over decades.
I respect Signal’s work, but it’s boneheaded attitudes like moxie’s which impede progress, especially for the younger generations.
It appears to be P2P, so, just like federated protocols, they are good in my book compared to centralized silos.
But I have yet to find a P2P chat protocol that works well in practice on mobile (energy efficiency/battery usage is a real concern, and mitigating it in practice means losing the benefits of P2P without the advantages of federated).
SimpleX is not purely P2P as there are servers that forward the messages. The battery consumption is still too high with SimpleX, but that can and is being worked on
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.
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.
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.
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.
If the messages are E2EE, the server wouldn’t have access to this information.
It would, just looking at how much data gets transferred
Unfortunately this is not enough. A malicious Signal server can mount a timing correlation attack and infer the social graph of an user. Having a centralized server makes it more difficult to mitigate such risk.
Yes and no. decentralization is great for a lot of reasons but it does come with downsides. I don’t know about you, but i convinced my family and friends to use and keep Signal for years now and i don’t think i would have had such luck with Matrix/Element, let alone a p2p app.
I’m glad decentralized options exist and think they deserve more funding and love, however.
My family uses Matrix, and if some don’t, I don’t talk to them online.
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
That’s a good response I hadn’t read before - thanks. Still so relevant 7 years on.
And since that time, XMPP has improved significantly (more integrated with other protocols, more efficient client and server implementations, bridges from and to activitypub, more approachable, easier to self-host…), but Signal.looks to have … stagnated? Well… the crypto payments/web3 shady stuff aside :)
10k downloads for a hideous outdated app is popular now?
FYI that’s an app that’s used by the German police and in several other “sensitive” contexts where users won’t just pull it from the play store :) ISIS even had their own fork at a point.
Source?
https://gultsch.social/@daniel/109828650796048124
that website is broken beyond belief, I can’t confirm anything
talking about the police site, not the mastodon link
It really took me a second to figure out: https://www.bundespolizei.de/Web/DE/Service/Mediathek/Jahresberichte/jahresbericht_2020_file.pdf , click on the PDF link, hop to page 48. But even without that, do you really believe that the developer of the app, who’s making a living of it, would commit financial suicide by lying so openly about such a trivial thing? Either way, with or without Conversations, XMPP is used by millions of users daily: https://www.rst.software/blog/22-companies-using-xmpp-and-ejabberd-to-build-instant-messaging-services
https://xmpp.org/uses/instant-messaging/
He is dodgy af. Doesn’t want any Signal forks (Molly being the only one tolerated) and won’t let them connect to the server. That’s why the open source version LibreSignal was shut down. He also doesn’t want Signal to be on F-Droid, a store which only allows 100% free/open source software.
Take everything coming out of his mouth with a grain of salt.
Totally agreed the project’s actions against the community are shit. From a LibreSignal issue:
This sounds like a jaded, cynical individual. It’s hilarious, sad, probably even delusional. How do they think the Internet and their operating systems work in this “modern world”? Magic fairy dust? It’s difficult, thankless work put in by loads of people around the world despite enormous commercial pressure to do otherwise. Over decades. I respect Signal’s work, but it’s boneheaded attitudes like moxie’s which impede progress, especially for the younger generations.
Look at https://simplex.im/ then. It’s work in progress but the design is good.
But I’m glad to have a better Signal client too.
The page isn’t loading currently… What protocol is it using? and if neither XMPP or Matrix, then why even bother?
The site is https://simplex.chat . It uses it’s own simplex protocol. There are no permanent user identifiers with SimpleX which gives a lot more privacy and independence. Here’s a comparison: https://github.com/simplex-chat/simplex-chat/blob/stable/docs/SIMPLEX.md#comparison-with-other-protocols
It appears to be P2P, so, just like federated protocols, they are good in my book compared to centralized silos.
But I have yet to find a P2P chat protocol that works well in practice on mobile (energy efficiency/battery usage is a real concern, and mitigating it in practice means losing the benefits of P2P without the advantages of federated).
SimpleX is not purely P2P as there are servers that forward the messages. The battery consumption is still too high with SimpleX, but that can and is being worked on
You got me there. There aren’t a lot of alternatives that have the same stability