Different people don't like it for different reasons. Some people don't like it because they think it has CIA financial backing (nope), and some people don't like it because it requires your phone number, therefore it is not private (the privacy it provides is more than sufficient for anyone not actively being persecuted by a Five Eyes state), and some people don't like it because it feels corporate (it's a 501c3 nonprofit, and how corporate it feels is subjective).
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2025
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Signal likely does not have
CIA financial backing
But this is the kind of information that can be only dispositive.
That is, because we cannot prove a negative, and the only time you can be certain about whether an organization—especially one like the CIA—has provided funding for something, is after it has been proven.
And some people don’t like it because it used to handle SMS on Android, and they removed that feature for security reasons.
That was a pretty wild decision
Handling SMS and handling secure/encrypted messages could've made people think they communicate securely while relying on text messages instead.
Not handling SMS fixes this source of confusion and I applaud their decision.
The problem is that most people don't want multiple text apps, they just want one. I had gotten a number of people using signal, and it was secure when we talked, but when signal dropped SMS, almost every one of them stopped using it, so then none of their conversations were secure.
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I think the number of people who care deeply about privacy and cannot tell the difference between an sms or signal message is minimal. There were plenty of ways signal could have highlighted DANGER UNSECURE CHANNEL if they had wanted to, or made it an off-by-default option, rather than drop SMS entirely. For myself and many other people it meant that family members dropped Signal rather than have an extra messaging app, and so I'm still stuck with WhatsApp on my phone...
If only the was some indicator for unsecure messages, such as a grey send button and an open padlock. 🙄
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It was very unpopular with my girlfriend, who I had just gotten into using Signal a few months prior.
This was such a dumb decision
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Accurate. And if you are being targeted by 5 eyes, your phone is probably fucked, one app vs another probably won't make a difference
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Some people don’t like that they attached a crypto wallet to the app. I couldn’t care less and use the messenger daily!
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Signal is an open-source privacy-focused end-to-end encrypted texting platform (so competing with SMS, WhatsApp, iMessage, Telegram, and similar). It’s developed by a donation-funded non-profit organization.
Signal is quite good compared to the competition, but it faces a lot of scrutiny because they make big promises about privacy and security so the people who care will really get into the details on that. Also IIRC there was a period when one of their competitors was trying to slander them more or less.
In general there’s nothing wrong with Signal and it’s quite a good option. If you really care about the privacy details you can always host your own instance (but that would require you to convince your friends to use your instance … it’s not federated).
The deal is that they run their program in a very transparent and wherever possible verifiable way.
More details here: https://lemmy.world/comment/14775870
Hey signal is better than most of the mainstream bs. I use it myself and I'm confident that the messages themselves are secure. However, it had issues.
Since we cannot verify the software they run on the server is the software that is open source then we must assume it is not.
We know for a majority of cases a phone number = a real identity. Signal implements sealed sender but since signal is a centralised point they can correlate the sealed sender extraordinarily easily. We must therefore assume signal knows when and who is communicating (We can verify they don't know what is being said) this therefore means signal could theoretically have a full social graph of real identities for every singe user.
This is of course after we remember signal received funding from BBG which is an organisation funded by the us government purely for the purpose of promoting american propaganda.
Also I believe they used to have federation but all evidence of this seems to have been wiped from the internet.
Signal can either adapt and prove themselves with more than a "trust me bro" or they can die. Just cos they are better than the alternatives does not mean we should not demand better.
great explanation!
we must assume it is not.
100% - Security is about capabilities, not intentions!
Don't assume - verify!
Also I believe they used to have federation but all evidence of this seems to have been wiped from the internet.
They never had.
The talk about federation originated when the EU demanded interoperability from gatekeeper software i.e. Whatsapp. Signal said on day one they wouldn't do from their end because it would mean lowering security.
There was LibreSignal once but it got shut down by Signal. It's quite old. This was like 10 years ago.
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If they encrypt meta data like they say they do (https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/), it should be very hard to use meta data the way you explained.
Whether they do can be looked up here (https://github.com/signalapp) by those who know what to look for.
As Signal uses reproducible builds (https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/), itcan be verified that the builds are made from the public source code.
They make offering a secure and trustable app a lot better (by being verifyable) than other messengers.
The point is we cannot trust they run the software they claim to run. Identifying a sender despite sealed sender is trivial if u have a centralised server.
Say I am the signal server and all the clients run the known/provable secure clients that are used. I as the signal server an subject to wiretap and gag orders so I can be obligated to run software that is not the published server software and into tell anyone. As a server I by definition have everyone's IP address. A message with signal protocol has a sealed sender and a known identity recipient. As the signal server I can see when u send a message and from what IP and to which identity and what ip that identity is. I can then simply associate IPs and identities.
I trust the app I cannot trust the server. A reproducible build does not prove anything about the server it only proves the client.
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This is a good comparison of messengers here:
https://eylenburg.github.io/im_comparison.htm
Btw, an imprtant aspect of privacy is how metadata are handled/leaked. Signal trues to minimize metadata leak to near zero (there are some other messengers that do that, like simplex)
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Signal is great, you should use it.
Current problems with signal
- it's centralized
- your encryption key is stored in the cloud
- It's not federated
Details
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Means it's vulnerable to government pressure, it's not wrench proof
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means you can't really trust it for sensitive things, like if you were running the french government communication systems it would be foolish to use signal. Signal uses the power of Intel SGX enclaves to keep your private key safe, so your trusting Intel not to sign something bad, your trusting sgx to not have exploits, etc.
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Means it's a walled garden, and not open to self hosting.
Signal is the best main stream e2e out there, but it's not the last one we will ever see, something will replace it
Your encryption key can be stored encrypted in the cloud. This isn't a fundamentally bad thing, but they should allow better protection than the short pins they allowed last time I checked.
Your encryption key is stored ON-DEVICE. Not in "the cloud".
In fact, they just had a big hullabalu about the encryption key being stored in plain-text on their desktop client, which they've now resolved.
They now use https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/api/safe-storage on the desktop client.
Both on device and in the cloud.
https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
That is why when you switch phones and register again with signal using your "pin", you can send messages to your contacts without your verification number changing.
https://github.com/signalapp/SecureValueRecovery2
The method has changed since that blog post.
So you are correct about it being stored in the cloud - they also seem to take much better care of it there, but when it's on someone elses server, your point stands - they can SAY they do anything. There's no way to actually test that. So thanks for the correction.
Anytime, I love it when lemmy is a collaborative space!
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There is not „your encryption key“ because there is not only one.
The cloud backup (protected by the pin) includes the contact list, NOT your messages. Those are encrypted on device with a key that is on device and can not be recovered by anyone from the cloud.
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It's mostly minor shit, it's better than the alternatives unless you self-host (which has a boatload of other issues).
my problem with signal is that they have a hard requirement to use a phone number for signup and that they don't want to do anything about federation or messenger intercompatibility.
Their resoning is that they only trust themself to keep the meta data safe and so need you. Leaves a little bit of a sour tast in my mouth that they don't even give their users the option to opt into federation.
they don’t want to do anything about federation or messenger intercompatibility.
Their reasoning is that they only trust themself to keep the meta data safe and so need you.
That's not their reasoning. Their reasoning is that it's much harder to evolve the protocol in a decentralized context than a centralized one. It's not that they only trust themselves with your metadata, it's that they can improve the protocol much faster in order to get rid of most metadata.
They have been able to deploy a ton of protocol updates with regards to minimizing the amount of metadata anyone has access to (including them), while other decentralized alternatives have essentially been stuck in limbo for a while:
- Secure Value recovery
- Groups V2
- Sealed sender
- Usernames
- Post quantum resistance
On the other hand, Matrix, XMPP and email are very leaky with regards to metadata. I'm not going into email because that's pretty documented, but here it is for matrix:
- Message reactions are not encrypted
- Group membership are not encrypted (which lead to attacks)
- Profile pic and Name are public (visible by everyone even people with whom you don't have any contact)
The thing is I have yet to see any reasonable alternatives.
Threema is the closest but it’s not free-of-charge, so a non-starter for most of my friends.
The others are controlled by Russia (telegram) or Meta. What else even is viable?
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How does simplex compare?
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