“Telegram has launched a pretty intense campaign to malign Signal as insecure, with assistance from Elon Musk. The goal seems to be to get activists to switch away from encrypted Signal to mostly-unencrypted Telegram”
Musk claimed that Signal has unpatched security vulnerabilities. As a cryptography expert I’m not aware of any: instead Signal has top-notch state-of-the-art encryption which has been adopted by its competitors it’s so good.
Telegram isn’t end-to-end encrypted by default. It has no group chat encryption whatsoever. It uses a bizarre, badly designed “MTProto” protocol about which dozens of cryptography papers have documented myriad unfixed flaws.
@bascule I saw this being shared around recently, even though it's from 2021: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-80825-9_5, in which the authors got a response from Signal explaining that this was not part of the security model. My understanding is that they are referring to this.
@sgued LOL that’s rich. Post-Compromise Security is a property that was literally pioneered by Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin when they designed the Signal protocol. Telegram doesn’t have it whatsoever even in the rare case someone enables its E2EE.
@bascule@matthew_d_green Genuine question here and please don't just call me naive. I have done research on Signal and I know it's the gold standard. Elon Musk not withstanding (I saw this from sources other than Musk) and did my research on Signal and where it gets its funding, who's to say it's not a Honeypot at this point?
The majority of its funding comes from the OTF who in turn gets the majority of its funding from the US Government.
@thepmofam@bascule@matthew_d_green
I think the point is that considering all projects compromised just because they received OTF funding doesn't make much sense, as (AFAIK) so far there has been no indication that the OTF binds their funding to introducing backdoors or anything. Sometimes the government funds good things, and sometimes different government agencies have very different goals 🤷♂️
@thepmofam@bascule@matthew_d_green
And if the people cry about that instead of pointing out real problems (like actual security issues), it should be clear that they didn't find any and have to resort to vague bullshit propaganda..
And if they push solutions that are provably unsafe(r), it should be clear that they aren't interested in your security, but have very different motivations (at least greed, possibly they even actively support surveillance)
@bascule@matthew_d_green The fact that you can't sign up to Telegram with the FOSS build of the app tells me everything I need to know. I also don't like privacy focused platforms that link accounts to a phone number.
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