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Comment by upofadown | Hacker News Reader

The article on end to end email encryption:

>Contrast all this with Signal or WhatsApp, where encryption works automatically because a single organisation controls the full software stack rather than using open protocols.

In a usability study involving Signal[1], 21 out of 28 computer science students failed to establish and maintain a secure end to end encrypted connection. There seems to be a tradeoff. We can do either usability or security, but never both at the same time.

[1] When SIGNAL hits the Fan: On the Usability and Security of State-of-the-Art Secure Mobile Messaging https://www.ndss-symposium.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/09...

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I think you greatly overstate the results:

"... our study assesses if users are able to detect and deter man-in-the-middle attacks on the SIGNAL protocol. Our results show that the majority of users failed to correctly compare keys with their conversation partner for verification purposes due to usability problems and incomplete mental models. Hence users are very likely to fall for attacks on the essential infrastructure of today's secure messaging apps: the central services to exchange cryptographic keys."

Why not just describe the actual results? Most Signal users aren't subject to MITM attacks and establish secure end-to-end connections with zero effort or thought.

> Most Signal users aren't subject to MITM

And, most people who use chat systems have no reason to hide things from the chat platform itself (because it's not interesting).

Like how practically nobodies emails are encrypted in transit or at rest by the providers yet we sort of consider them to be private (to bring it back to the topic at hand), nobody really thinks hotmail, gmail or your company is going through your emails- when they absolutely can, either during delivery or just whenever they feel like it.

It doesn't mean we should stop trying to ensure people have secure and private means of communication, just because some people aren't meaningful targets.

(FWIW, I don't think any of the E2EE for Whatsapp/Signal/etc is meaningful since the provider of the client is the provider of the platform.. therefore you're trusting them anyway to not include anything to intentionally weaken your privacy- but people don't like this conversation).

This paper is from 2016. Signal's UX has improved massively in many ways since this was published.

Arguably things are now worse. Signal combined the safety number of you and your correspondent into one really big number[1]. The result is a less intuitive as a number no longer represents the identity of a correspondent.

Signal has been having multiple issues due to the poor usability of their identity management lately[2].

[1] Safety number updates https://signal.org/blog/safety-number-updates/

[2]

A Third Party Breached The Intercept’s Signal Tip Line and Has Been Soliciting Whistleblowers https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/intercept-signal-tip-line-bre...

Twilio Incident: What Signal Users Need to Know https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/4850133017242-T...

Russian State-Backed Hackers Intensify Attacks on Signal Messenger Accounts https://thecyberexpress.com/signal-attacks-russian-fackers-t...

End to End Encrypted Messaging in the News: An Editorial Usability Case Study (my article) https://articles.59.ca/doku.php?id=em:sg

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