Hacker News Reader

Comment by lima | Hacker News Reader

> for 90% of my chats, all I need is "good enough" security which both iMessage and Telegram

True for iMessage, but not for Telegram. Telegram has great UX, but does not use end-to-end encryption.

(Telegram's "secret chats" do not count - they're not the default, nobody ever uses them, they only work on mobile, and use a questionable DIY encryption schema)

View on HN

Not true for iMessage either. The addition of iCloud Backup (on by default, and not e2e) functions as a key escrow for iMessage, rendering iMessage also no longer end-to-end encrypted (as Apple receives a copy of the keys in the automatic nightly backup).

Turning off iCloud Backup doesn't fix it either, as your conversation partners back up their keys.

To add to the list of flaws with Telegram's secret chat implementation, you have to wait until the other user is online before you can start one.

Why don't they count? I use them. I don't really care if they only work on mobile. This questionable DIY scheme operates under the assumption that Moxie is the only one allowed to roll his own crypto: MTProto 2 is fine.

Everything is a convenience trade-off, all the time, for everyone.

E2E encrypted chats do work on Telegram Desktop if you’re on a Mac and using the native Cocoa build (not the Qt one).

I remain curious as to why this is, but I use them often enough when I find Signal a pain in the ass to deal with.

iMessage is not end to end encrypted either.

To be honest, for 99.9% of my use cases, I value the ability to easily log in to different devices with automatically synchronized one-to-one/group chat log more than true E2E encryption, granted that Telegram has promised to not analyze the data, and I decided to trust Durov. The other 0.1% is when I need to send credit card numbers, which I can also do within Telegram, using secret chat, which does have E2E encryption.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com