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Comment by mathfailure | Hacker News Reader

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> Or do they want us to believe 3-letter U.S. agencies don't have access to Signal right now? Is this some publicity stunt?

[Citation needed]

I believe the citation falls under "street smarts" as the WikiLeaks press release mentioned Signal explicitly. Whether this was a subtle outing the origin of the tool itself is left as an exercise for the reader.

Regardless, the threat vector is accessing the data before encryption anyway. And drawing attention to yourself by running certain apps and services in the first place.

There's a lot of mathematicians in maryland and those who studied the history often land on "if they want you, they got you."

I'm on the same page with you, mathematicians and the math itself. I'm not a complete stranger to whats and hows of the craft either.

I honestly wanted a source to investigate the claim further, not to stab the commenter.

OTOH, you have given a couple of leads, which I can follow deeper. Thanks!

You have to think from time to time.

If there are even NDAs that forbid mentioning their existence - how would you cite them?

And here we're talking about 3-letter agencies in U.S.

Of course they have the access and of course you can't ever prove it. One could even argue that Julian Assange didn't leak anything and it's all lies and he can't prove it, lol.

The US does not have a law requiring all messaging applications to store historical messages and provide access for law enforcement to decrypt and view all messages.

The US may (or may not) be capable of decrypting Signal messages themselves -- but that is a different issue. The US does not (currently... it HAS been discussed previously) ban the use of any particular encryption techniques because US agencies are incapable of breaking those techniques. And there ARE techniques that US agencies are incapable of decrypting.

The law? Not even US president cares about the law, then why would 3 letter agencies do?

There is no evidence or reason to believe that US intelligence agencies can access signal messages when used properly.

It would be much simpler for them to compromise the phones of targets vs break the signal protocol. This is generally true of secure communication systems, the flaws tend to be in usage and endpoint security, not in the protocol implementation.

Right. I have zero illusions about the presence of many critical security vulnerabilities in my smartphone. Just look at how many are fixed each month.

However, i have also reason to believe that the cryptography of my encrypted messaging app Signal is sound and there's no backdoor.

Indeed. One of the most important properties of a cryptosystem is its resistance to ordinary human screw-ups. And that's before you get to intentional co-operation.

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