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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

> French authorities had penetrated the Encrochat network, leveraged that access to install a technical tool in what appears to be a mass hacking operation, and had been quietly reading the users' communications for months.

Sounds like their servers got popped, probably ones distributing updates, and also sounds like hand rolled crypto from their website although that doesn’t mean much if they can access the devices.

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Breaking "hand rolled" crypto is a very hypothetical threat, almost a non-existent threat, as in practice software with centralizedly controlled distribution model has many much much bigger weaknesses that advanced threat actors are going to exploit, like updates. Assuming they even can successfully break such crypto at scale, imagine how much effort would it take just to get to the encrypted bytes given all the VPNs, TOR and overlay networks providing extra layers of encryption and privacy/anonymity hiding who talks to whom by sending packet through other countries.

I guess what people should learn from this is that encryption isn't a protection without solving problems caused by centralization first.

Well, I wouldn't say that's true, hand rolled crypto notoriously is weak when your adversary has cryptographers... like governments.

And this system sounds extremely snake-oily, and likely making typical bad crypto mistakes everywhere.

That's a good summary.

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