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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

If you wondering why cryptographers haven't claimed the $300,000 prize offered by Telegram, this is a good start:

http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/telegram-crypto-challenge/

I don't think you should use Telegram.

What should I use for casual, daily chatting with friends that runs on Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, Windows Phone, web, and allows group messaging and message history search?

I'm in the same boat. I use Telegram. Not because it's secure (I don't know, I believe others that claim that it might not be), but because it works for me.

WhatsApp (most popular?) doesn't. ChatSecure (most secure?) doesn't.

I'd say 'Use Telegram' with the caveat that you shouldn't trust it blindly? Use it as a better and cross-platform SMS/text experience, which might or might not be more secure.

If you're a Telegram user who's cautious with what you say, assuming that anything you transmit could potentially be intercepted, you will certainly be more secure than a {Chat,Text}Secure user with complete faith in their technology.

Edited to add: The same could well be true for someone using plaintext.

I keep seeing these dire warnings whenever Telegram is mentioned, and I don't understand the hate. Is it some super secure platform? Probably not, but people needing a provably NSA-resistant chat client is such a tiny percentage of the people interested in regular chatting. None of the warnings I see have the nuance of "don't use it if you think it'll keep you safe from the government, but otherwise it's a pretty nice service to use" nor do they list the chat services that they feel are more secure.

Compared to the alternatives of Skype, WhatsApp, SMS, Hangouts, iMessage, etc it's a good chat service, with a relatively lightweight native client on multiple platforms, actual working sync, and good recovery when used on poor Internet connection.

People don't like Telegram because they claim to be a company which cares deeply about security and privacy, offering a "200% secure" chat client, while blatantly ignoring the concerns of the security community. Doing things like using a hand-rolled, proofless KDF isn't just a bad idea when considering a nation-state adversary. It's a bad idea against every adversary. It's the cryptographic equivalent of staking an ADT sign in your yard without purchasing an alarm.

It is unethical to market snake oil.

The press have been bad-mouthing our cars recently based on the fact that they explode violently if they crash.

Are they super-duper safe? No. Will driving our cars grant you immortality? also, No.

But no car can promise this, and driving any car inherently runs the risk of dying - No car is provably 100% safe! If you're really worried about this, just don't drive!

Most car drivers won't care anyway, very few people crash their cars on a day-to-day basis, so it's not really relevant.

</good-natured-sarcasm> exaggerated/straw-man comparisons, or appeal-to-low-standards doesn't really satisfy these kind of concerns... <good-natured-sarcasm>

"Telegram is a messaging app with a focus on speed and security...."

If it's not actually secure then they shouldn't advertise it as secure.

An app that advertises itself as secure but isn't is naturally going to attract more hate than an app which doesn't advertise security in the first place.

Nobody forced them to advertise security. If they just wanted to be a a good chat service with the advantages you listed, they could just do that. But if you advertise security, you had better deliver!

> I keep seeing these dire warnings whenever Telegram is mentioned, and I don't understand the hate.

The hate stems from two main sources:

1. They're claiming to be secure in a very flamboyant (even arrogant) manner by challenging the world's cryptographers to break their protocol, but the contest is structured to be unwinnable regardless of how shitty their crypto actually is.

2. Telegram spends less time improving their crypto (which is full of WTFs) and instead markets themselves to people who aren't technical enough to figure out how shitty it really is.

Seriously, avoid Telegram. If you want Signal to work on more platforms, send a check to Open Whisper Systems and help them build up their team to cover more area.

Terrorists are secure whatever they do.

The 4 or 5 people in the nsa that actually do any work don't stand a chance against several hundred million baby breeders with ak47s.

Message history search? Do you even want to use a secure messaging app?

Just use Telegram and ignore people with obvious beef against it. At least it's not Hangouts or Facebook chat.

What do you mean "at least"? You're better off with Hangouts or Facebook chat - Telegram flags you up as someone trying to hide, while not offering any actual security.

It has 60 million monthly active users, and it doesn't even encrypt by default.

I think I agree that using encryption on Telegram singles you out though!

and google is probably an open system to the NSA and US government, you dont need to even appear to be someone who has something to hide they will target you because they easy have access to your data.

Aside from Windows Phone does CryptoCat cover it?

Telegram. For secure things, Signal/ChatSecure or something else by moxie. For 99% of the shit you do, the convenience will usually outweigh the limitations brought on by doing crypto properly, for instance not having a desktop client.

Edward Snowdon recommends Signal from Open Whisper Systems.

And it's a good recommendation, IMO. Still not something I'll ever use because it too slurps up contacts. I mentioned this some time ago, and the responses were interesting - from "that's not a bad thing" to "but they do it in a nice way".

Claiming to be secure, and then taking what's mine away from my control is unacceptable to me.

Phil Zimmermann has developed a new protocol, which Silent Phone uses, which makes it impossible (or very hard) for the server to know the contacts on your phone while doing discovery.

I'm going to write up the protocol and publish a reference server I wrote in Go in a few days. I'll post it here and send it to Open Whisper Systems as well, they may want to integrate it.

Just a bookmarking comment

Just in case you don't know, if you upvote a comment then it becomes available on your profile page under "saved comments."

Obviously, if you're extremely liberal with the upvote button, this may not be useful as a bookmark....

I think I should make a bookmarklet for HN to do additional things like this.

Useful?

I would call it Show.hn :-)

Why not bookmark the link to comment though?

If you mean a browser bookmark, I personally fell out of the habit of using those ages ago, because syncing them was way too difficult.

Thanks, I was unaware

Just a notification comment:

https://github.com/SilentCircle/contact-discovery

Considering the source is available - https://github.com/WhisperSystems/ - it should be reasonably straightforward to take the piece of code out that accesses your contact list? (On iOS, and by the sound of it, latest Android OS, you can also just disallow contact access via the system UI.)

Signal doesn't upload your contacts anywhere. That was the whole point of their "Private Contact Discovery" blog post. ("How do we determine which contacts are registered with a service, without revealing the contacts to the service?") [1] A hard problem that no other messaging app has bothered to solve, AFAIK.

Yes, Signal The App reads your contacts to construct the blinded signature query. Does it then do something nefarious with them? No: https://github.com/WhisperSystems

What alternative solution to the PKI key introduction problem would you rather see? You could go the iMessage central key broker route, but that means trusting that Apple won't introduce the wrong key to you (or be compelled to do so). [2] Or, you could let users exchange keys in person a la key signing parties. That's a reasonable feature request at this point, but advanced usage and not something that gets you traction with normal people. TextSecure/Signal wouldn't have gotten to where it is today with that much friction around key introduction.

[1] https://whispersystems.org/blog/contact-discovery/

[2] http://blog.quarkslab.com/imessage-privacy.html

I have not carefully checked, but based on the paragraph from your contact discovery link

For RedPhone, our user base is still manageable enough (for now) to use the bloom filter technique. For TextSecure, however, we’ve grown beyond the size where that remains practical, so the only thing we can do is write the server such that it doesn’t store the transmitted contact information, inform the user, and give them the choice of opting out.

I would expect that Signal does share contact information with the server.

I believe that comment is out of date, since there are multiple entries on the support forum about what to do if the contacts bloom filter fails to download. [1] [2]

But now you've got me curious. I'll dig back into the code and find out for sure.

[1] http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/21274348...

[2] http://support.whispersystems.org/hc/en-us/articles/21247614...

Redphone was only on IOS and there are not similar entries under Android->Signal.

It'd be nice to figure it out, but I guess it isn't that important, Signal still leaks lots of metadata, so anyone that would be burned by sharing their contacts isn't gaining much by using it (or any other mobile comm...).

I'll use it once I don't need google services and a google account to run it on my android phone.

I don't know about the Google account requirement, but you can use gmsCore to replace Google Play Services:

http://o9i.de/2015/10/23/howto-gmscore.html

I've been using the unofficial fork[0] that uses Websockets instead of google stuff. Been working awesome for me.

There's even an fdroid repository[1] you can add to track libreSignal apks.

----

[0] https://github.com/JavaJens/TextSecure [1] https://fdroid.eutopia.cz/

Obviously the same app will not run on every possible platform. So the question should be; what protocol should I use for casual daily chatting? Message history search would be the part implemented at the client level.

This tendency to talk about the name/brand of the client instead of the protocol is a current problem with IM. The ISIS people should really be writing articles about OTR and TOR to address their particular application.

I have a friend that thinks I use the Pidgin chat system because that is what she uses when she chats with me on XMPP. Since Pidgin does not run on her phone she thinks she can only chat with me when she is at her computer. So far all attempts to explain the idea of an interoperable protocol have failed.

Da'esh, ignoring the fact that they're a terrorist organisation, are actually trying to solve an interesting problem, which is, they need to be both secure, but also engage with/recruit people who are not so tech savvy and are used to easy social media apps with simple UX - basically they NEED to be BOTH secure AND accessible. So whilst they likely know of more secure options like PGP or OTR, these are not what their target audience are using or have the capability to use - they are interested in keeping the dragnet for new recruits wide, so have to tailor their approach for the current generation, hence Telegram, which is supposedly secure and also already making inroads in the current market as an alternative to WhatsApp, and is less geeky than something like Signal.

I remember years back when I attempted the same problem with a thing called Wire, for activists, that I posted on here and combined Facebook/Twitter type stuff with "secure" messaging, which was a web based UI that implemented AES256 based browser encryption based on the Stanford JS library. I got thoroughly roasted by people that knew what they were doing, so I shut the project down realising that what I was doing was dangerous due to lack of qualification. It's interesting seeing all the projects that have sprouted up since, and clearly I was on the money with the initial idea.

https://github.com/radiosilence/wire

Facebook messenger, since privacy wasn't in your list of requirements. At least then you won't have the illusion.

Telegram is private enough (unless you are in a list somewhere)

FB Messenger works fine but of course is not private w.r.t. FB

Seems a good enough reason to use something different

Considering this or the other blogpost about Telegram "waving their math PhDs" is under literally every Telegram-related comment section I've ever been in on HN, I think people know.

What do you think about https://threema.ch/en?

https://threema.ch/en/faq/why_secure https://threema.ch/validation/

It's closed source.

So did they follow up with the promise to relax the contest framework (as mentioned by Durov in the comments)?

They did, which ended in February (https://telegram.org/blog/cryptocontest-ends) - I've also seen mention of a round 3 with even more relaxed rules due for around now, but I can't find it anywhere now.

It was awesome how the post refuted the challenge using an entertainingly bad protocol.

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