maqp

Could we finally get SHA256 fingerprints. Or BLAKE2, or SHA3-256, or SHAKE256, or BLAKE3, or LITERALLY ANYTHING BUT SHA-1, pretty please?

Some DJs use this principle when they need a hacky stage mic. They plug their headphones to the mixer's mic input, and shout to the speaker element.

and many LEDs are weak photo-diodes, i.e. you get weak current when you shine a light to them.

The sad part is, Instagram is exceptionally damaging to kids for a disjoint set of reasons.

A lot of bug fixing relies on some mental model about the code. It manifests as rapid "Oh 100% I know what's causing" -heureka moments. With generated code, that part's gone for good. The "black box written by a black box" is spot on on, you're completely dependent on any LLM to maintain the codebase. Right now it's not a vendor lock thing but I worry it's going to be a monopoly thing. There's going to be 2-3 big companies at most, and with the bubble eventually bursting and investor money dying, running agents might get a lot more expensive. Who's going to propose the rewrite of thousands of LLM-generated features especially after the art of programming dies along with current seniors who burn out or retire.

>Loading your messages on Signal can take quite a while.

Yeah if you have to go through hundreds of ratchet steps, yeah it will take time. That's expected. The only way to make it faster than that is to deploy it without privacy. That's cheating.

>Why are you ignoring the fact Signal actively prohibits third-party clients?

Because it's not a problem for security.

>Yes, Telegram is far from perfect, and inferior to Signal when it comes to E2EE.

Telegram's lack of ubiquitous E2EE is a blocking issue. Signal's wait times is a problem that goes away with 5G, 6G etc., and with them nanometers going down.

>But what makes you reject the proprieatry blob claim when it's true?

What blobs? Firebase? I have bad news for you wrt Telegram https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram?tab=readme-ov-file#compila...

>Because your favorite messenger is being attacked?

Not my favorite messenger. Nor is it my messenger. Signal is the best messenger for day-to-day use though.

The server IPs are hard-coded into the Telegram client's source:

https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/d7deedfa33ddfa51c72a5...

You know you can just run

$ git clone https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram.git && cd Telegram && FILE="TMessagesProj/jni/tgnet/ConnectionsManager.cpp" && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.175.50' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:b28:f23d:f001:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.167.51' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'95.161.76.100' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:67c:4e8:f002:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.175.100' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:b28:f23d:f003:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.167.91' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:67c:4e8:f004:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.171.5' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:b28:f23f:f005:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1

To get when the IPs first appeared, right? :D

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

2020-06-04 dceccae0b Update to 6.2.0 (1984)

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2

They've been the same IP addresses for ELEVEN years, and they precede the article you linked by THREE YEARS.

They're not playing the catch-up with Russian government. Either Russian government is completely incompetent in that they're blocking 3,000,000 IP addresses and failing, or they are LYING about attempting to block it, which would indicate Telegram is a Russian op.

Nice touch with the IP :D

The ratchets would have different state yes. The MITM would mix in different entropy into the keys' states. It's only detectable if the MITM ever stops. But since the identity key exfiltration only needs to happen once per lifetime of installation (longer if key is backed up), the MITM could just continue forever since it's just a few cycles to run the protocol in the server. You can then choose whether to read the messages or just ignore them.

One interesting way to detect this would be to observe sender's outgoing and recipient's incoming ciphertexts inside the client-to-server TLS that can be MITM'd by users. Since the ratchet state differs, so do the keys, and thus under same plaintext, so do the ciphertexts. That would be really easy way to detect MITM.

The real story is, MAX is there to scare people into Telegram. Durov isn't your friend, neither is Putin who doesn't bother blocking connections to the server.

>So I wouldn't count on its E2EE either.

This is the worst way to assses E2EE deployment. 5D-chess.

>Signal still requires a phone number and proprietary Google blobs on mobile.

Telegram also requires a phone number. If you didn't have double standards, I bet you'd have no standards.

>Many third-party Telegram clients exist

The official implementation and default encryption matters. 99.99% just assume Telegram is secure because Putin supposedly tries to block it. They don't know it's not E2EE. And no third party TG desktop client offers cross-platform E2EE or E2EE groups. IIRC there's exactly one desktop client that tries to offer E2EE 1:1 chats but that's not seamless. TG has no idea how to make seamless E2EE like Signal.

You ignoring that Signal is both open source and always E2EE and complaining about it's "proprieatry blobs" yet looking past TG's atrocious E2EE speaks volumes.

Yeah it's really hard to block tally count of five IPs. https://telegramplayground.github.io/pyrogram/faq/what-are-t...

No wonder the great Russian firewall is struggling to keep TG at bay. Wake up.

No end-to-end encryption by default. WhatsApp has.

No end-to-end encryption for groups. WhatsApp has.

No end-to-end encryption on desktop. WhatsApp has.

No break-in key-recovery. WhatsApp has.

Inferring Telegram's security from public statements of *checks notes* former KGB officer and FSB director -- agencies that wrote majority of the literature in maskirovka, isn't exactly reliable, wouldn't you agree?

>I know the default assumption with Telegram is that they can read all your messages

The client is open source. It's trivial to verify this is 100% factually happening. They have access to every group message. Every desktop message. Every message by default. If you enable secret chats for 1:1 mobile chats, you are now disclosing to Telegram you're actively trying to hide something from them, and if there ever was metadata worth it for Keith Alexander to kill someone over, it's that.

>they seem less cooperative and I never got the notion that they ever read private messages until the Macron incident

We have no way to verify Telegram isn't a Russian OP. I'd love to say Pavel Durov fled for his life into exile https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/technology/once-celebrate...

But the "fugitive" has since visited Russia over SIXTY times https://kyivindependent.com/kremlingram-investigation-durov/

Thus, I wouldn't be as much concerned about what they're handing EUROPOL, but what they're handing FSB/SVR.

Even if Telegram never co-operated with Russian intelligence, who here thinks Telegram team, that can't pull off the basic thing of "make everything E2EE" that ~all of its competition has successfully done, can harden their servers against Russian state sponsored hackers like Fancy Bear, who obviously would never make noise about successful breach and data exfiltration.

>How come they are able to be this exception despite not having end to end encryption by default?

They've pushed out lie about storing cloud chats across different servers in different jurisdictions. Maybe that scared some prosecutors off. Or maybe FVEY is inside TG's servers too, and they don't like the idea of going after users as that would incentivize deployment of usable E2EE.

Who knows. Just use Signal.

Yeah Telegram only has 1:1 opt-in E2EE, that you can't use across your devices, so either you or your buddy quickly gets tired of whipping out their phone when they're sitting at their laptop, and just replies you through Telegram's non-E2EE cloud chats, and that's the backdoor. The user activated it. It's "their fault".

>I don't really see how it's possible to mitigate client compromise.

You could of course offload plaintext input and output along with cryptographic operations and key management to separate devices that interact with the networked device unidirectionally over hardware data diodes, that prevent malware from getting in or getting the keys out.

Throw in some v3 Onion Services for p2p ciphertext routing, and decent ciphersuite and you've successfully made it to at least three watch lists just by reading this. Anyway, here's one I made earlier https://github.com/maqp/tfc

Signal protocol prevents replay attacks as every message is encrypted with new key. Either it's next hash ratchet key, or next future secret key with new entropy mixed via next DH shared key.

Private keys, probably not. WhatsApp is E2EE meaning your device generates the private key with OS's CSPRNG. (Like I also said above), exfiltration of signing keys might allow MITM but that's still possible to detect e.g. if you RE the client and spot the code that does it.

"Many forms of dynamic code loading, especially those that use remote sources, violate Google Play policies and may lead to a suspension of your app from Google Play."

https://developer.android.com/privacy-and-security/risks/dyn...

I wonder if that would deter Meta.

>Not that I trust Facebook or anything but wouldn’t a motivated investigator be able to find this key exfiltration “function” or code by now?

Yeah I'd imagine it would have been found by know. Then again, who knows when they'd add it, and if some future update removes it. Google isn't scanning every line for every version. I prefer to eliminate this kind of 5D-guesswork categorically, and just use FOSS messaging apps.

No I said signing keys. If you're doing MITM all the time because there's no alternative path to route ciphertexts, you get to generate all those double-ratchet keys. And then you have a separate ratchet for the other peer in the opposite direction.

Last time I checked, by default, WhatsApp features no fingerprint change warnings by default, so users will not even notice if you MITM them. The attack I described is for situations where the two users would enable non-blocking key change warnings and try to compare the fingerprints.

Not saying this attack happens by any means. Just that this is theoretically possible, and leaves the smallest trail. Which is why it helps that you can verify on Signal it's not exfiltrating your identity keys.

How are you hiding it from IDA pro though?

Nice! Hey, question: I noticed Signal at one point had same address on Google Play Store as WA. Can you tell us if Signal devs shared office space with WA during integration of the Signal protocol? Related to that, did they hold WA devs' hand during the process, meaning at least at the time it was sort of greenlighted by Moxie or something. If this is stuff under NDA I fully understand but anything you can share I'd love to hear.

Well the thing is, the key exfiltration code would probably reside outside the TCB. Not particularly hard to have some function grab the signing keys, and send them to the server. Then you can impersonate as the user in MITM. That exfiltration is one-time and it's quite hard to recover from.

I'd much rather not have blind faith on WhatsApp doing the right thing, and instead just use Signal so I can verify myself it's key management is doing only what it should.

Speculating over the correctness of E2EE implementation isn't productive, considering the metadata leak we know Meta takes full advantage of, is enough reason to stick proper platforms like Signal.

thanks I'll have to test this out!

2027: OpenAI Skynet - "Robots help us everywhere, It's coming to your door"

Something that wasn't mentioned in the article - if you're coming from Windows and using Foobar2000, you'll want DeadBeeF https://deadbeef.sourceforge.io/

> at least telegram is fast

Telegram is fast precisely because it's backdoored by design. Forward secret messaging app with proper key management has to encrypt the message to every peer in the group. Telegram can just use single packet to server that then pushes it to everyone else. This difference will die over time as 5G and 6G take over and phones get faster by generation. Telegram will not get more safe by generation. They're only playing to get as many users to their roach motel to make it as difficult as people for people to leave.

Yup, yet for some reason we see Telegram always pushed on secure messaging app chats, up until the point when someone points out it's not secure at all like it tries to advertise it self. Then it's always about the fun features it has, even if it's acting against the user's best interest, which is the definition of Trojan horse malware .

Also, there's a LOT of people who have joined Telegram because of its perceived security. The company has been extremely vocal about WhatsApp being horrible despite it having always-on E2EE, when in TG it's practically always off.

>Telegram can make it work because they do have it if you switch it on per chat

You can't enable 1:1 secret chat from your desktop client. The secret chat doesn't appear on desktop when you enable it on your phone. So you're forced to drop end-to-end encryption if you want interoperability between phone and desktop clients. You can't enable secret chats for group chats on any client. The company isn't working to make secret chats actually usable.

>I guess you are from Ukraine?

Nope.

>Definitely not Signal, slow and unfriendly

The thing is, friendly apps are apps that respect your human right to privacy. There's a term for applications that appear to do something useful while doing something against the user's interests without them knowing: A Trojan Horse. Which is a malware classification.

When you view it through that lens, Telegram is the unfriendliest app out there outside completely unencrypted messengers like Palringo (at least used to be the case), where anyone can read your message from the cable with WireShark.

The OTRv4 project is apparently dead. The last commit from Celi was four years ago https://github.com/otrv4/otrv4

>working on all devices makes it very nice.

Signal has end-to-end encryption working on all devices. Telegram doesn't because they're amateurs.