This is the gist of it. Telegram is mostly like an uncensored blog platform at this point. Probably the only platform to host official channels of Navalny, Zelenski, Dmitry Medvedev, Russian and Ukrainian milbloggers at the same time.
And for public channels, E2E is pointless - everyone can see it anyway.
But until someone actually published any hard evidence demonstrating weaknesses (ideally with a PoC), do we have anything else to go by?
I wouldn't say I know for sure Telegram is 100% secure against government interception, but I also wouldn't claim the opposite, because neither ends/claims have been demonstrated and proven in a verifiably way.
Here you go:
I think you might confuse what the mud puddle test aims to demonstrate. It's to be able to confirm E2E encryption, which if you do that test with Telegram + Secret Chats (which is the E2E encryption feature in Telegram), you'll see you cannot recover those messages.
It depends on what you mean by "as a whole". I mean that Telegram by default can read all your private chats, unless you manually enabled e2ee and suffer from related bad UX. On Linux desktop (and phones) it doesn't even allow to enable e2ee at all.
There's "New secret chat" option on my Android client. Or what do you mean by "phones" here?
Yes, this is the expectation. You use someone else's platform that doesn't have E2E, you assume they can read your messages and will help law enforcement to do the same. No surprise there.
Doesn't mean their E2E feature isn't secure, or that the platform as a whole isn't secure. Facebook surely shares their Facebook + Whatsapp data with US law enforcement, we wouldn't call Facebook/Whatsapp insecure just because of that.
I and many others certainly would.
I mean, if nothing else, that's a bad default. This makes it worse than, say, WhatsApp or the apple messaging thing, nevermind the likes of Matrix or Signal.
The weakness is that e2e encryption is disabled by default, and is a giant pain to enable.
E2E is only for Secret Chats, yes. And yeah, I don't think people use Secret Chats by default.
> and is a giant pain to enable.
Starting a Secret Chat takes one more tap than starting a normal chat.
Hmm, the article says this:
>As John Hopkins security researcher Matthew Green pointed out in his blog on the subject, it’s also a pain in the ass to activate. “The button that activates Telegram’s encryption feature is not visible from the main conversation pane, or from the home screen. To find it in the iOS app, I had to click at least four times—once to access the user’s profile, once to make a hidden menu pop up showing me the options, and a final time to ‘confirm’ that I wanted to use encryption. And even after this, I was not able to actually have an encrypted conversation, since Secret Chats only works if your conversation partner happens to be online when you do this,” Green said.
Telegram doesn't even claim to have end-to-end encryption by default (you have to enable it explicitly on a per-chat basis), and doesn't have it at all for group chats. Like, unless they are lying and secretly _do_ have e2e by default, it is clearly worse than many alternatives from this pov.
It's kind of weird that it has come to be known as a secure messenger, but it certainly isn't.
The security researcher cited in the article used a different flow by going to an existing contact's profile first and opening the hamburger menu there, and claimed the feature is "hidden" because of that (the hamburger menu), when in fact it isn't. Maybe it's different on iOS though, I don't know.
Try to do it on a desktop Linux. There is no such option.
I am using it on Matrix just fine.
WhatsApp made E2E the default only in 2016, i.e. 7 years after it was founded. Telegram is 11. The whole thing reminds me of http vs. https. Chrome started marking http as "Not Secure" only in 2018. I remember at some point the wisdom was that using http is OK as long as you don't use it to access your bank account etc. So https was like an opt-in ("if you want additional security"). But now it's the default. Telegram resists making E2E the default reportedly for UX reasons (easier data sync on multiple devices).
The main page says Telegram is "secure" without elaborating, though. I can see people can be misled, but they're not lied to.
Their website also used to say that they are forever free, no ads, and that they were going to open source all their code, including the server code. Now they have a free tier, but even they couldn't call it "forever free" anymore. I wouldn't trust anything they write there =)
Aside from that, I don't trust Telegram or its CEO at all, partially because of what you said about open-sourcing (or not) and partially because of his ties to Russia and Azerbaijan.
Shouldn't it at least provide some guarantee that what you receive is what was sent?
And then there is even stuff like OMEMO, which is E2E, but intentionally does not do authentication of messages, quite the opposite: It's protocol is designed such that you can always deny having sent such a message...