 #Telegram and #Durov are once again in the media, so I translated my May piece about the service to English: Telegram is neither "secure" nor "encrypted" Calling Telegram "secure" or "encrypted" is misleading, and is journalistic malpractice. Telegram itself seems to mislead about it on purpose. Telegram's encryption protocol is suspicious and transmits cleartext device identifiers with every message. They have been called out for it many times, and refuse to change. 102 comments
@rysiek they are routinely reported as secure/encrypted when they are in the news - I saw several stories repeating this with the news of the arrest in France.  Yeah, it is weird how articles about Telegram in mainstream press try to paint it as some kind of trusted privacy service. Has Telegram PR department been briefing press in this way? @FediThing @simonboggis yes. Media is basically parroting Telegram's marketing language without giving it a second thought.  @rysiek @FediThing @simonboggis Plus they have a cult of toxic fans who "correct" anyone who tries to set the record straight...  @dalias Possibly quite telling that the Russian government condemned the arrest so strongly. 🤔  @rysiek@mstdn.social  @rysiek we also need to discuss security and privacy separately. I’ve seen so much “the encryption is so bad” but I have not found any information if it’s actually broken. an then… the very difficult question about moderation - and with that, where censorship may begin. there is however no doubt that telegram is very important for Ukraine and the people in danger as well. @waldschnecke it's important for Ukraine and people in danger because people choose to use it. We should guide them to safer alternatives instead, Telegram is putting people in harm's way. I write about the encryption and why it is bad. One of the main points is that Telegram is misleading people about it. Secret Chats are unwieldy and limited, and have to be turned on explicitly for each contact separately – and thus almost nobody uses them. But Telegram pretends everything is encrypted. @rysiek Don't get me wrong; I agree with you! Of course it's a choice; but we also know it's difficult to make people change. I deleted Whatsapp years ago, I have lost contacts because of it. > By that standard they should get to other CEO's too. Other CEOs of what kind of services? Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? Yeah, probably there is some responsibility to consider for unencrypted social networks. Signal? WhatsApp? Absolutely not, these are end-to-end encrypted internet messaging services, and the service providers have no access or control over the contents of conversations. Telegram is a social network that pretends to be an encrypted IM. @rysiek That is exactly the question. > In Signal and Whatsapp you have the problem that your Phone number is known to anyone in a group chat Not in Signal anymore. They finally solved it: But agreed on privacy controls etc.  @rysiek @waldschnecke it has been partially fixed at best. You still can see the phone number in app versions from before the update.  As long as Signal does not cooperate with local officials this would be also okay when not (like telegram) - but they do. Which means that your activist group can be anonymized with a search warrant against signal. https://signal.org/bigbrother/santa-clara-county/ Also Signal is again a central service and it is much better to do this error not again und bring up the next big entity that can screw us over. @m @rysiek True. A question of threat-model to an extend? I use Stickers and Gifs quite extensively and a lot of ppl i know do this too. ppl just do not care about E2E, they care if their emotion they have can be easily represented and how much fun it makes to write with friends ... all Matrix clients fail miserably at this. Funnily enough this is also a reason why i don't use Discord that often. It is just not acceptable nowadays to press enter and your messages only appears after 2 seconds... and your client has layout recalculation errors. @rysiek @m @waldschnecke this is the reason I stayed with telegram after moving away from whatsapp and trying alternatives years ago.. I wasn't even able to really send videos and such on signal back then in addition to other functionality I considered essential for an IM app. telegram had it all and so i stayed. Turning on e2e manually is annoying but not a deal breaker. Having a half functioning app like signal was back then is one. Still I will try signal again since it seems to have improved a whole lot The only really secure messenger is Matrix, but it is quite unusable. The best client i have found is FluffyChat which is at least on par with WhatsApp all considered. Sadly Telegram has by far the best UI, UX and Dev UX there is of all messengers, which is why i like to use it, also it is fast as heck. @m you might want to double check on Matrix though: Matrix is a decent IRC replacement, but a secure messenger it is not. I've always felt that encryption was bolted-on as an afterthought in it and that that will lead to tears, and as time goes by I get more and more proof of this. I have recently and my experience was quite shitty and it is so bad that i cannot use it. I posted about it a bit, the only thing that somewhat remotely is usable for me is FluffyChat and they do not support a lot of great accessibility stuff i want, like voice messages that you can convert to text easily, send quick videos, send your location for the next hour or have a "send without sound/ send when online" features. @m yeah, the whole encrypted IM space is and has always been a clusterfsck. Sigh. :sad_cat: What do you think about XMPP with OMEMO? Would be nice to have a decentralised alternative to Signal. I _love_ XMPP, I've run a long time a ejabberd server and it was really my favorite until now. Especially this stuff is _fast_ and the extension system is just technically awesome. _but_ no one uses it (ik ik WhatsApp but lets be real here, this is not XMPP as in "i use XMPP for IM") So, if XMPP had more people using it, and it was easier to sign up, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it? I've been playing around with Snikket as a potential way to get more people trying XMPP. Have you any views on it? For what it's worth, the default Snikket app has OMEMO on by default, voice/video calls and voice messages, plus image/document/location attachments, but it doesn't have stickers or GIF pickers. @FediThing @m I don't have strong opinions on it other than when I tried XMPP the usability was always an issue. I know there are projects like Snikket that made great strides on this front though. @FediThing@social.chinwag.org @rysiek@mstdn.social @m@lgbtqia.space  @rysiek @m imho matrix is still better than telegram in this respect, and if not using a phone number or not having (latest) android/ios phone is important then i don’t know if there’s better choice. (i know about jami and briar, but they fill a different niche and syncing messages between devices seem a hassle, if possible at all) @rysiek @m Apparently, these issues were already known and not considered to be serious, which is why they remained. https://mastodon.social/@krille@troet.cafe/112965796119221788 PS: If the issues were as basic and far-reaching as the blog insinuates, why are multiple countries using Matrix for their military and administration? @ArcaneAlchemist it's not "some blog", Soatok is a solid security researcher. Ignore his insight at your own peril. Also, did you really just argue that surely a certain solution is perfectly fine because nation states use it? Really? :blob0w0: Because that would make Microsoft Teams by far the best communication solution in the world. @rysiek @m I'm judging it as a "blog" because of the style of language and the disclaimer at the beginning. I'm not saying Matrix is perfect, but considering that (at least Germany) is actively contributing to it, I expect that they also have experienced security researchers looking at the codebase. To use your argument, why go through all that effort if they could have just used WebEx and Teams? Arguing that the devs and auditors are all incompetent is a bit far fetched, don't you think? @ArcaneAlchemist I am not arguing that "devs and auditors are all incompetent", please kindly refrain from putting words in my mouth. People miss things all the time. The fact that A Large Organization or State is using a given tool does not necessarily mean they audited it. And even if they have, it doesn't mean there are no security issues. I linked to a specific piece of information on specific security issues found by a good security researcher. Do what you will with that info. 🤷♀️  @rysiek I also wrote about the factually bypassed Encryption in #Telegram on http://wp.blausand.net/telegram-vs-signal/ For the moment it might not be quite the challenge, because Signal just set up their system smarter than Telegram did, from what I remember. Signal's legal strategy when it comes to government requests is to first fight it tooth and nail, but when they eventually have to cooperate, they do, via "ah well, there you go, take this bit of nothing". It's a consequence of their messenger design, but it means they are legally cooperative when required, and they have designed… … their messenger accordingly, knowing they have to, which is a smart move. Telegram's legal strategy, from what I remember, seemed to be to just plainly ignore any government requests, the consequence of which might just have happened to Durov now. So I think Signal has already a pretty smart response to legislatory forces. Of course there could always be a more authoritarian environment, but that would require a very straightforward mask-off approach in legislation. … … While we shouldn't get complacent, I am carefully optimistic that we might manage to steer clear of any obvious legal constructs forcing more invasive measures from communications providers. But the legal requirement of moderation has been there forever, and Telegram's design is such that it would in principal be possible. Telegram just ignoring anything in that regard might not have been the smartest approach. That's of course just my superficial read on the situation. @cherti I feel it's worse. Telegram is a mostly unmoderated social network that is purposefully masquerading as and pretending to be an encrypted IM. What this means is that its users are tricked into a false sense of security and thus put in harms way. And it also means that the actually secure, encrypted IM services, like Signal, become tagged with Telegram's failings. Pretty obnoxious if you ask me. But hey, how would Durov get a private plane otherwise, right? @rysiek et all. This where I feel we might mention Vailid chat and as things get worse Reticulum. If they haven't been mentioned. I am still in the process of figuring them out (I'm an enthusiastic end user with little technical skill) @fiend_unpleasant I am pretty excited about Veilid and Veilid Chat, but Veilid Chat is a proof of concept at this stage. @rysiek You might reconsider the part "Telegram vs Signal". Signal does not offer functionalities that are used by most users of Telegram. There is only "one small feature" in a "big Telegram shop" that can be replaced by Signal. The funny part is, that feature is not used by most users. @stamberry the whole point of this piece is that: 1. Telegram bills itself as "encrypted IM" (which it is not) 2. Telegram constantly compares itself to Signal on security and privacy, claiming Signal is less secure and private (which is also false). I do believe it's fair game to take Telegram to task on this. If Telegram wants to not be compared unfavourably to Signal on secure IM features, it is welcome to stop comparing itself to Signal on secure IM features. 🤷♀️ @rysiek When you write a text about Telegram, you represent yourself, not "Telegram marketing team".  > Claiming that “Telegram is encrypted” is like claiming that pizza is a healthy food, because there’s a slice of tomato on it. ***chef's kiss*** Thank you for translating the article into English. It was very informative. @rysiek It is even worst than that, as you detail it in the article. By default, the messages are not sent E2EE at all. They are just encrypted by the TLS connection to the Telegram servers. That's all. And you can imagine that of course most of the surveillance agencies of the west, have the private keys of those TLS certificates. So the question remains about the true motives of the US+FR authorities in arresting him.   @rysiek That's why I don't share important personal data via telegram. Telegram is for the lulz. For getting cheetah/Fox/wolfpics every hour, joining the "TechCrimes" channel or talking shit with some gaming buddies. For serious conversation, there's Signal. Thanks for this writeup. I have had many people tell me I should use Telegram because it's "safe and secure" and I no longer try to argue, I just laugh.  @rysiek@mstdn.social It may also suit the intelligence services if this misconception continues to exist. @rysiek Oh god, yes goddamnit! I watched a Fireship video about the arrest and it was crap, with an even worse comments section. Telegram's sus at best.   @rysiek okay this is the one I was stalking through your feed for. Gonna need to talk to some friends about switching off Telegram.  |
Gregory's Server
Despite the claims that #Telegram never shares any data or metadata, there are relatively clear cases of them having shared metadata with an Indian court and German law enforcement.
There are strong indications, as reported by Wired, they might have shared message contents with the Russian government, targeting activists in Russia.
By default, Telegram chats do not use end-to-end encrypted mode aka "Secret Chats". End-to-end encryption is also completely unavailable for groups and channels.
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Despite the claims that #Telegram never shares any data or metadata, there are relatively clear cases of them having shared metadata with an Indian court and German law enforcement.
There are strong indications, as reported by Wired, they might have shared message contents with the Russian government, targeting activists in Russia.