Here’s what he said in a post on his telegram channel:
🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷
🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕🦺
🕵️♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡
🕵️♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤
🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪
Original post: https://t.me/durov/274
Telegram’s server side software is closed source, owned and ran by them exclusively so they really have no room to talk. WhatsApp doesn’t even have OSS clients so they’re even worse in that regard
exactly, they (Telegram) don’t need to put sketchy code in the clients when most messages are not E2E encrypted and they control the servers lol
Still the code in telegram desktop client may not be sketchy, but is ugly as fuck, so that too should be considered.
and run* by them
It’s hard to overstate what a nothing-burger this article really is! Let me break it down:
- Signal got $3 million from the Open Technology Fund at some point in its development
- Some anonymous source alleges that the OTF’s ultimate goal is to promote US foreign interests
- The current chairman of the board Katherine Maher worked at the National Democratic Institute and Wikipedia before
- The same anonymous source says she was recruited because of connections to the OTF
- She has at some point voiced the opinion that a completely free internet without regulation just reproduces existing power structures, and that balancing regulation and 1st amendment rights is a tough problem
- Signal doesn’t have reproducible builds on iOS (it absolutely does on Android btw)
- Some people feel like Signal chats come up more often than they should in court cases and media reports
That’s it, that’s the whole story. That’s the reason why the Telegram guy of all people thinks you should be careful, and better use his chat service instead, and the Twitter guy agrees.
I mean, reproducible builds on iOS would be nice, but that platform has much bigger problems from a privacy/security/sovereignty/freedom standpoint anyway. And the rest is just nothing turned up to 11.
tl;dr “Signal might be untrustworthy because the tech came from a State-sponsored project and the current chairman acknowledges that Wikipedia has a white and Western bias.”
just wait until they find out pretty much all tech we have can be traced back to government-funded research.
Did you know the early early internet researchers were part of a clandestine government organization known as ARPANET??? The entire TCP/IP stack is just a state-sponsored backdoor into your life!!!
WAKE UP SHEEPLE!!!
yea just wait until they find out why the first digital computer was made:
ENIAC was designed by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory (which later became a part of the Army Research Laboratory). However, its first program was a study of the feasibility of the thermonuclear weapon.
Getting “Tor is pentagon spyware” vibes from OP
I guess it’s the usual Russian propaganda tactic throughout Telegram. Mixing conspiracy theories with half-truths.
The NSA indeed distributed a defected encryption library in the past. These days I’m pretty sure big techs use open source encryption to avoid this trap.
And Telegram says blah, blah, iPhone is exploited. But IF Telegram is correct on this one, Andriod versions would be defect as well.
Lol telegram calling signal insecure is too funny.
Isn’t it that Telegram doesn’t claim to be super secure, apart from possibly their encryption on mobile?
This doesn’t prevent them from uncovering other possible plots in supposedly secure platforms.
True but in this case there credibility is low
Maybe he should focus on adding e2e encryption to the default chats and group chats instead of spreading FUD.
Telegram: There are backdoors in Signal encryption!
Also Telegram: not encrypted
Telegram secret chats are e2e encrypted though
Secret chats only. With their own, in-house encryption, that, if I remember correctly, the apps don’t use according to the specifications.
Maybe I’m mixing up mtproto 1 and 2 with that second part, though.
AND only available on mobile.
AND 1-on-1 chats only, no e2ee for group chats available at all.
I don’t mind in-house encryption (the Signal protocol didn’t just appear out of nowhere either), however the latter part is worrying.
In any case, I personally don’t trust Signal or Telegram.
What do you trust? It seems like something like Molly is the best for compatibility and security.
Molly still depends on Signal’s centralized servers.
Best solution I know of currently is SimpleX, though Veilid (and VeilidChat by extension) also seem promising, though it might take a while for those to be usable.
From a cryptographic and usability perspective Signal still has a few benefits. However Simplex is promising.
The best is to not trust the centralized server of either of these platforms. Set up your own XMPP server & gives these the boot.
No thanks. XMPP is old and dead
XMPP is battle-tested* and thriving*
I don’t think you know how many commercial use cases are relying on XMPP, nor how much the community has been working on updates. Older technologies tend to have maturity is spec but also in implementations where the servers are robust & already at the point of optimization over chasing features. We see this with how little specs it takes to run a server & have Conversation forks on Android have some of the best battery life & data plan usage in the chat space. The network is massively decentralized too… unlike Matrix where almost everyone is on Matrix.org or a server provided/hosted by Matrix.org giving them all the metadata.
Molly is just Signal with a different name and on more depositories
And no proprietary software or dependencies
The Signal servers it connects to run proprietary or unauditable software, no?
But extremely hard to use to the point that nobody uses them. I send a secret chat to someone and they write me back in the unencrypted chat.
It shouldn’t be possible to send anything unencrypted
Tbf not all the chats being E2E encrypted is a UX compromise. It makes Telegram a lot nicer to use across devices and allows just accessing your messages from anywhere without needing your phone to be on. Plus no need to back up chats etc. because they’re all just on the server. As opposed to secret chats, which of course are bound to one particular device and can only be accessed from there.
I’m all for E2E by default but I must say I actually like the idea of having a choice in this particular case.
There’s no reason for secret chsts to not be stored on the server and to not be synced to all your devices. We’ve had double ratchet for a while. Telegram rolling their own crypto is dumb for many reasons
Correct me if I’m wrong, but even with double ratchet, retrieving and decrypting the message history is tricky / impossible, no? Afaik signal does allow you to receive new messages on multiple “linked devices”, but a new linked device doesn’t have access to any messaging history.
That behavior would be a major improvement to telegram
From a privacy POV, sure, not trying to argue that. Just saying that Telegram does have a bunch of features like that that wouldn’t really work if all chats were always E2E encrypted, so there’s a reason that it’s opt-in. Whether it’s a good one or not is up to you to decide for yourself.
Though I definitely think that Telegram could do a much better job explaining the trade-off, especially in a world where many major messengers are always e2e encrypted, and people somewhat expect it to be the default.
But for some reason they don’t develop features for e2ee like the other chats. Perhaps it’s just hard
It’s encrypted though?
You are trusting their server security and them as a company, sure, but it is encrypted against the server for sure.
It’s not as good as ir could be but that’s no reason to spread misinformation.
Looks like a push to discredit Signal right now. While I know Signal isn’t perfect, I do like it and I haven’t seen anything that is better (on the whole). The 3rd “emoji-point” is quite an accusation, and I would love to see any evidence of this kind of thing, that didn’t result from the cops unlocking a defendants phone, or having infiltrated a chat.
While I know Signal isn’t perfect, I do like it and I haven’t seen anything that is better (on the whole).
Agreed. But it is worth mentioning that XMPP with OMEMO seems to be the current gold standard - runs almost everywhere, tons of available (free) servers, secure end to end messages, and fully auditable public source code.
I have used xmpp a lot, but I can’t really recommend it to friends and family as a secure messenger. There are too many compatibility issues between clients and servers. If your friend is on a client or server that doesn’t support the same encryption protocols, then you can’t have a secure chat. Basically there is too much user knowledge and effort required at this time, for xmpp to be a good, secure, general use chat. I very much look forward to this changing. I also really like Matrix, but it is still a bit rough around the edges as of my last check.
I use xmpp all the time. Biggest hurdle for certain fam/friends using xmpp has been certain android builds (samsung) and ios interfering with timely notifications. User knowlege is not a problem as I can recommend the apps that are compatible encryption protocols with mine.
That’s great, and I’m happy it’s working out for you. It’s still kind of a bummer that this open protocol ends up fragmented across all those clients and severs. I’ve met other Linux enthusiasts online, connected with them via xmpp only to find we can’t encrypt our chats. Neither of us wants to give up our preferred client for various reasons, so we have a non-working situation.
Hmm, I see. But isn’t there an obvious solution to this? One of you just run two different clients side-by-side?
Sure there are workarounds, but every one of them erases a bit of convenience or is at odds with the benefits of federation. Again, I think XMPP is great, but I wish it was better. As it is now, it doesn’t fully meet my needs better than Signal does.
Yea, I hear you. I use both.
Well if only those samsung & ios users that never get my messages until I see them and tell them to open their app had phones that didn’t interfere with it running in the background / push notifications it would be working out for me even better, but that’s not an issue with the protocol or client but with OS’s being hostile to xmpp.
client or server that doesn’t support the same encryption protocols
Outside of TLS which most any server uses by default, XMPP or not, the server is not responsible for E2EE. Conversations Compliance & Are We OMEMO Yet have existed for a long while & I never see anyone recommending a client not on these lists so while certain features may be fragmented, the communication essentials have been more or less established for years now. XMPP is an extensible format, and some applications that aren’t for chatting with your friends/family, don’t need many of these features which allows the protocol to morph into something stripped down for the task… which is why the base spec is basically barren, & community XEPs are what folks get behind for adding new features for different use cases.
Agreed on all points. It’s not the best solution when I can’t get both parties into it successfully.
That’s why I still use Signal a good bit.
That may be true, but wake me up when they capture 0.5% of the messaging app market :)
Tin hat time:
I wonder if Russia’s trying to get everyone on Telegram because they have control over it.
This is probably just Telegram seeing an opportunity to peel some users away from Signal during a period of heightened paranoia in the West (anti-genocide organizing).
They moved from Russia because Russia tried some shit so no .
Maybe not Russia, but they sure are working with a certain government:
The 3rd emoji is just bs. Then again, most of his post is bs
Sounds like someone is mad that security experts would rather trust a tried-and-true encryption standard over Telegram’s encryption which is known to not be anywhere near as secure as the Signal protocol.
Pavel resorting to outright slander to promote Telegram is not something I expected to see.
he does raise very valid points about reproducible builds, which should be a priority if your product is security
Edit: oh @Wolflink below points out that such builds are available for Android, but iOS has issues stemming from Apple and not Signal. This then begs the question, why is Telegram reproducible on iOS?
You need some loops to jump through to get there. But that can be achieved for Signal as well, if you check the discussions regarding reproducible builds for Signal’s iOS client, you’ll see that people just decided it is not worth the hassle to push it through.
This then begs the question, why is Telegram reproducible on iOS?
Is it really.
that’s indeed what I am asking
Sounds like someone is mad that security experts would rather trust a tried-and-true encryption standard over Telegram’s encryption which is known to not be anywhere near as secure as the Signal protocol.
There’s an issue in Russia with graduates of a few of the “kinda top” universities considering themselves elite, but not quite being as qualified as they think.
Durov’s brother won a few programming competitions for highschoolers. Because of that apparently he should be considered something in cryptography. For people thinking like this at least.
Pavel resorting to outright slander to promote Telegram is not something I expected to see.
Why, it’s very much like him.
Go read the GitHub issue. The main difficulty in implementing reproducible builds is the code signing Apple requires as well as other tweaks Apple makes to modify the binary from what the dev submits to what gets downloaded from the App Store. Note that Android already has reproducible builds. Also the reason the GitHub issue was closed wasn’t “refusal” to implement the feature, they wanted to move the discussion to their forums.
How does Telegram ensure reproducible builds for iOS? Or is Dorsey lying
Who knows how apple decides to do anything? There may be some really stupid arbitrary reason apple modifies signal but not telegram just because apple insists on being difficult. If you don’t trust apple don’t use an iPhone and just download it on android.
that’s not a fantastic answer to my question…
Why all the emojis? Why can’t people just write an article?
he is maybe flexing the “custom emojis” feature of telegram, see original post
It’s like a memetic form of neoteny, “the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood.”
I’m waiting for the day when a politician responds to a motion on the floor with “bruh.”
It seems like you’re passionate about emojis
This comes a few days after Jack Dorsey confirmed that he had left the board of Bluesky and then starting to use Tw(X)tter and calling Tw(X)tter “freedom technology”. Coincidence ?
???
Is this guy stupid or what, current day Twitter could not be further than “Freedom technology”.
You can barely even see Tweets while logged out for fucks sakeEarlier on Saturday, he unfollowed all but three accounts on X: Edward Snowden, Stella Assange, the wife of the WikiLeaks founder Julian, and Musk.
“Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” Dorsey tweeted. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one).”
Despite his promotion of alternatives to the site he founded, Dorsey has publicly shared his admiration for Musk. In 2022, he called the multibillionaire the “singular solution I trust” for the future of Twitter, though a year later he criticised Musk for his “fairly reckless” moves after taking control of the site.
Why does it say Telegram, but it’s about the Twitter/Bluesky guy?
Actually, nevermind. It’s just confusing.
You don’t need a backdoor in signal to bypass its encryption.
All you need is to exploit the phone and wait for them to open or use signal.
If you think your phone is safe from the NSA or similar services, I got some bad news for you.
I’m 100% secure, I have Nord VPN
This comment sponsored by NordVPN
I forgot to post an affiliate link and explain how routing all your internet traffic though one company equals security
That works for every IM.
It’d almost like… phones aren’t secure.
Nothing is against the attack described TBF.
Say, if I run only OpenBSD, carefully selecting non-base applications, with tightened setup and so on, the baddies may just come when I’m not at home and flash a trojan into my laptop’s UEFI.
Well, it’s easier with phones because these likely already have plenty of backdoors to do this remotely, available only for nation-states.
I’m starting to like the taste of this “conspiracy theorist” thing.
All you need is to exploit the phone and wait for them to open or use signal.
Physical access is root access. But just because you can’t make something NSA-proof dosen’t mean you can’t make it bloody difficult to break into.
There’s been enough zero day remote exploits that there’s bound to be more.
Pretty sure there’s more than 1 about receiving an SMS and the payload rooting the phone and you not even knowing it happened. At least 1 but I think 2 or more.
Something about a malicious image also rooting a phone.
It goes on and on and phones don’t always get security updates.
You can do your best, but then longer you use a given phone the higher the risk. That’s why people switch out phones frequently when doing shady or important shit
Okay first things first Jack Dorsey is a tool
The US government / CIA did in fact develop the protocol back in the day, with the goal of helping people in China and other countries message securely, probably with ulterior motives.
But the protocol itself is open source, and you can use it without any affiliation with the US government.
The claim " It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕🦺" is therefore so stupid it almost invalidates everything else being said because the person writing is either an idiot or purposely misrepresenting the facts.
Not having reproducible builds is definitely weird though. Does anybody have more information on that?
Not having reproducible builds is definitely weird though. Does anybody have more information on that?
They boast this as a feature, but on the instructions for how to do this for iOS, even Telegram admits “As things stand now, you’ll need a jailbroken device, at least 1,5 hours and approximately 90GB of free space to properly set up a virtual machine for the verification process”. Browsing the steps, it’s extremely complex, and doesn’t seem like something that is very user friendly and that you’d do weekly or monthly when a new version is released.
On the GitHub issue linked to in the body, it’s disingenuous to claim they refused to implement this, and that the technical hurdles Apple has in place make this extremely difficult which halted progress. In the community forums where the conversation was moved to, someone pointed out that even if you were to reproduce it on a jailbroken iPhone, that there’s no way to confirm that non-jailbroken iPhones aren’t receiving a version with a backdoor.
And even if you are using a jailbroken device exclusively and can confirm the reproducibility of the iOS app, then the risk becomes the latest available jailbroken iOS could be outdated from the real versions, and you’d have other issues with not receiving timely security updates. This same issue applies to Telegram also.
EagerEagle posted a good comment under this post going over the client code stuff, pretty enlightening stuff.
My theory is that apple wont let the developer share there code for IOS because of “security”
I remember an emulator (retro arch i think?) Got on ios at one point and was later removed because it showed apples file system layout. Which apples reason was “because it could be used to make malware for IOS”
I feel like there is some similar thing with signal IOS
deleted by creator
Maybe fix Telegrams privacy problems.
https://www.404media.co/this-tool-shows-some-telegram-users-approximate-physical-location/
I can’t read it because of the paywall but IIRC (based on a similar article) that was such a nothing-burger issue.
People turned on an entirely optional (I think off by default setting) for some feature that allowed discovery of users by location … and shocked pikachu they could be tracked or something like that.
It’s not nothing if Telegram makes people believe they only share their location in a limited manner, but instead broadcast it to the whole world. That’s a serious breach of trust. I don’t know why Telegram users keep making excuses for that platform.
I don’t know why Telegram users keep making excuses for that platform.
Honestly? Because the others are just so bad.
- Element has an extremely clunky UX and uses Electron. The other Matrix app implementations are incomplete buggy messes.
- Signal can’t sync old messages to the desktop, uses a messy Electron interface, and lacks a bunch of features/polish I’ve come to expect.
- Discord doesn’t even pay lip service to privacy and uses a similarly doesn’t invest in native apps.
- Threema has been saying that cross-platform/multi-device connectivity is coming for like 2+ years and has had nothing but the most minor of unexciting features added.
- WhatsApp is run by Meta, has a crappy desktop experience, and has had several serious security vulnerabilities.
- Jami is … extremely glitchy.
- Session is basically Signal backed by a Crypto platform.
If someone took Telegram’s UX and feature set and paired that with Signal’s approach of “everything is encrypted”, that would be a winner. I kinda hope someday Telegram just does that and moves everything to E2EE. When Telegram was launched E2EE for group chats/at scale wasn’t really a thing … now it’s not nearly as novel but nobody has deployed E2EE with a feature set like Telegram’s.
It’s not nothing if Telegram makes people believe they only share their location in a limited manner, but instead broadcast it to the whole world.
That’s not even what happens by the way. It’s just that you can spoof a device into random locations and eventually figure out where someone is.
I mean it’s pretty bad to practice mass surveillance.
A “toot” isn’t a very persuasive piece of journalism.
I can verify that it absolutely impacts groups run by queer communities in the Gulf, because I was in one such group that was monitored and shut down by Etidal.
That claim needs a lot more investigation and context. At the very least, it needs investigated by a credible third party.
Also, do you even know what the feature you’re criticizing is? A “channel”? Because it’s not even really a part of the messaging portion of Telegram. It’s basically an in-app blogging platform.
She links to a news article: https://www.saudigazette.com.sa/article/641746/SAUDI-ARABIA/Etidal-Telegram-remove-over-16-million-extremist-contents-in-early-2024
I don’t think Telegram denies doing mass surveillance. They might deny targeting queer groups and claim to only target extremist, whatever that means.
That news article talks nothing about targeting groups unfairly and only talks about removal of extremist activity from what’s a social media platform (which is standard practice for all social media platforms). Specially that article talks about targeting “combating the online propaganda of ISIS, Hay’at Tahrir Al-Sham, and Al-Qaeda” which I believe is uncontroversial for all decent and reasonable people.
- Telegram allows everyone in a chat to delete messages by anyone from anyone without a trace, making gaslighting easy.
“I told you so!” - “No you didn’t!” - (mutual distrust forever)
If that’s your bar for gaslighting I hate to tell you I can just edit my messages all over the place to say things that were never said.
Skill issue. Get real friends who don’t do this shit.
What polish and features is signal missing?
- Signal can’t sync old messages to the desktop
- Persistent voice rooms
- Custom emoji
- Animated emoji
- Location sharing
- Chat folders
- Topics/rooms for larger group chats
- Support for larger group chats
- Quoted replies (i.e., quote part of a reply or create an arbitrary quote block)
- Code snippets
- Message forwarding
- Polls
- Animations in the UI
- Detailed custom theming
- Chat room theming
- A content index (e.g., view only the files, links, videos, etc that were sent in this chat)
- Group invite links to people you don’t have in your contacts
- Channels (i.e., micro-ish blogging)
- A nice bot API
- Subjective UI/UX changes to put things in more reasonable places (e.g, why can’t I right click on a chat to pin it in the desktop client, why is the Electron menu bar shown by default)
And probably several other things I’ve forgotten because … basically nobody I know is still using Signal.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Signal does have location sharing and invite links, FWIW.
Signal’s location share AFAIK can’t be a live location share (which is useful during events like amusement park trips and stuff)
They have invite links to group chats? I don’t know how that would work
Also Simplex.chat
I don’t think i care what Jack Dorsey says that isn’t backed up independently. Even if he’s right i just don’t trust him.
You shouldn’t need to trust open source, it should be independently verifiable. Unfortunately that’s not possible with either signal or telegram, as there’s no way to tell what server code they’re running.
If encryption happens client side then it doesn’t matter.
Its where the server is open but the client is closed that we need to worry, as is the case with Beeper
Closed sources server (even open source with no verification of the code running on the server) means it’s possible the server records who you talk to, when, where and the size of the messages. This can be useful to sell to advertisers.
Cloud source server or open source server, you can’t know what server their running.
Pavel’s whole argument here is basically the same thing for the client; “you can’t verify the build in the app store matches what’s in the source code, so you have no way of knowing it’s actually what you’re auditing.”
If the client is open, then you can check to make sure that all metadata is encrypted.
You don’t need meta data to know these things. Any server handling the traffic for the app will know these things.
Not true for all messengers
Only if the messenger is P2P, I don’t know of any popular messenger like that.
I’m wondering if Dorsey has any stakes in Telegram’s crypto bullshit…
Yes, sorry, but I can’t take something seriously if every paragraph begins and ends with an emoji. I know it’s dismissive, but all my Facebook lunatic conspiracy theory alarm bells are blaring.
It’s more normal in Russian-speaking Web.
Shouldn’t trust this guy anyway, it’s VK’s founder talking.
