Post #4493775 · Elektrine

2026-08-11 08:56 UTC

@arcanechat@fosstodon.org what part is FUD??? The part where you say: Switching from #WhatsApp / #Telegram to #Signal is not a solution if you really care about #privacy, #resilience and #autonomy Your only rationale in the comic is that they are hosted on AWS. Which is a problem for a secure private messenger only for a protocol that is not designed to avoid leaking any sensitive data including the shape of the communication graph to an adversary with complete control over the server. all of them are centralized services and depend on phone numbers, which makes them easy to censor This is misleading. The phone number in Signal is not used for message routing at all. It can be used to make you discoverable to contacts that were previously using the phone / SMS to connect to you. Being discoverable by your contacts is important for a private messenger because it gets you a big anonymity set quickly. for a start, there is no single adversary that can observe the whole network, and switching from one relay to another and using several at the same time is easy, without losing your chats & data! To take the two parts of this in turn: First, I would suggest you search for the term 'global passive adversary'. It's a core part of how any private messenger expresses its threat model. And, although a perfect global passive adversary doesn't exist, ones that monitor more than an entire country do exist. The second part is the real problem. How many people are there on each relay? I don't need to monitor the entire network to see what a person is doing, I need to monitor the servers that they talk to, and who those servers talk to. That's a much weaker adversary (achievable by a huge number of potentially hostile entities). And the way that you defeat an adversary like this is to have a large anonymity set, so that correlations between messages arriving and leaving are hard. how does signal, a central observer with access to all users' IP addresses is any better? We know, from the results of warrants, precisely what can leak from Signal: the timestamp at which you joined the network and the timestamp at which the client last connected to the network. What can a warrant with your protocol deliver? But if you're leaking things to a passive adversary that require an active compromise of another system then it doesn't matter if your system might be more resilient to an active attacker: an active attacker doesn't need to bother if people use your system. Just knowing which relay they talk to is already giving more data than a warrant against Signal delivers. But it also highlights the problem with a lot of distributed messaging systems: You can easily turn a single point of failure into a lot of points of failure. If a relay is operated by someone malicious, how much of the network's traffic can they observe? But, more importantly: you did not answer my question. You just attacked Signal. There are lots of things I dislike about Signal but you aren't even giving answers that tell me that you have solved the problems that they have solved, and you've got a design that introduces a load of hard problems that they don't have. Maybe try talking about how you've actually solved some hard problems with security and privacy, rather than starting off with an attack on other projects and claiming that you're better than them?

Replies (4)

@Kukmetz@social.vivaldi.net 2026-08-11 11:31

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @arcanechat@fosstodon.org "...there are serious concerns that organizers should discuss and further study. These include: (1) Signal’s extensive ties to the state and major corporations, (2) Signal’s extractive and anti-democratic corporate model, and (3) Signal’s technical dependence on companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which could open it up to surveillance or censorship. https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/03/07/the-revolution-will-not-be-signaled/ "New tracking tool exploits WhatsApp/Signal delivery receipts to monitor users silently, and reveal daily routines using just phone number." https://www.cyberkendra.com/2025/12/free-tool-can-spy-whatsapp-and-signal.html #Signal collects #Metadaten the same as #WhatsApp https://primal.net/e/note154hta9dt8k4mhleu4z20rwlqd85dxap20xtvcy4fq89uzcrwshpsdelk2t Meet Paragon: An American-Funded, Super-Secretive Israeli Surveillance Startup That ‘Hacks WhatsApp And Signal’ https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/07/29/paragon-is-an-nso-competitor-and-an-american-funded-israeli-surveillance-startup-that-hacks-encrypted-apps-like-whatsapp-and-signal/ Secure Messenger 86 #Threema = the most secure messenger 82 #SimpleX 80 #Session 78 #Signal 64 #Wire 63 #Element X #Matrix 45 #Viber 42 #Apple #iMessage 32 #Whatsapp 31 #Google #Messages 30 #Telegram 30 #Facebook Messenger 15 #XChat Source: https://www.securemessagingapps.com and rate 🟩=3 🟨=1 🟥=0

Open ##4497823
@arcanechat@fosstodon.org 2026-08-11 12:06

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange > This is misleading. The phone number in Signal is not used for message routing at all it is not, any government can block Signal's servers and SMS codes for login in, in places like Iran while Signal is not working during shutdown, ArcaneChat and similar do > Your only rationale in the comic is that they are hosted on AWS. the thing is, besides any technical matter, it is just plain bad to support Signal when millions of dollars donated go to Amazon and other big tech

Open ##4499067
@arcanechat@fosstodon.org 2026-08-11 12:02

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange > what can leak from Signal: the timestamp at which you joined the network and the timestamp at which the client last connected to the network you seem to be on a higher protocol level ignoring that Amazon servers know users' IPs (often this means location/city) out of the control of Signal, the adversary can go directly to Amazon for this info without needing collaboration of Signal, and can know then what IP/user is sending message/traffic/data to whom

Open ##4612846
@LukefromDC@kolektiva.social 2026-08-13 08:32

@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange @arcanechat@fosstodon.org The whole point to end to end encryption is that neither the network nor the server has to be trusted to protect message content. The point to Signal being open source is that the insertion of a backdoor to "escrow" keys or scan decrypted plaintext would be instantly caught due to it likely being under a microscope by mutually opposing parties. It is reasonable to treat AWS and the Big Telcos providing every link between the phones of users as malicious, so Signal is designed to resist such attacks. Whatsapp by comparison is closed source and controlled by a proven adversary, Meta. Although it supposedly uses the same comms protocol as Signal, it could be doing anything in the background: snarfing keys, scanning and forwarding data, anything. A really stupid backdoor might be detected using Wireshark but a smart one could be tough to find without access to the source code,

Open ##4612850