Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal(signal.org)
signal.org
Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal
https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/
167 comments
I agree with your message but you're way too harsh. At least these guys, unlike antivaxxers, have genuine concerns. Maybe they're not considering the even worse alternatives in their comments, but then again, that's not really their business. Signal isn't losing users because a couple of nerds are pointing out weaknesses in its security.
> People NEED an alternative to Facebook messenger, Facebook WhatsApp, closed source Viber and Telegram
In a broad sense, they don't actually - being pretty much happy with all these messengers.
In a broad sense, they don't actually - being pretty much happy with all these messengers.
Telegram is not closed source. Unless they mean the server.
And in terms of server, Signals is "open source" but you can't run one yourself so how can you be sure really. :\
And in terms of server, Signals is "open source" but you can't run one yourself so how can you be sure really. :\
You're right, but I mean there's no messenger problem at all for vast majority of the people, and privacy and security aren't features people tend to choose over any other feature.
[deleted]
You might want to try to stop telling people what they may or may not do. You want to stifle possibly valid criticism with dogma by comparing the healthy and informatve discussion here with 'anti-vaxxers'.
Adding to that, nobody in the top 10 root comments is actually "discouraging people from protecting themselves".
Adding to that, nobody in the top 10 root comments is actually "discouraging people from protecting themselves".
Here it is again.
>Anything against signal is propaganda and anti-privacy because of the big picture
>anything against telegram is deserved because I've been told it's bad that they rolled their own crypto
Fragmentation/competition in this space is good. If you think whatsapp is less secure than Signal despite the author of this software working on it then maybe you need to evaluate for yourself if he is indeed "a leader in the field".
>Anything against signal is propaganda and anti-privacy because of the big picture
>anything against telegram is deserved because I've been told it's bad that they rolled their own crypto
Fragmentation/competition in this space is good. If you think whatsapp is less secure than Signal despite the author of this software working on it then maybe you need to evaluate for yourself if he is indeed "a leader in the field".
This particular change on private contact discovery looks like a great initiative, like many others by Signal.
I'm all for privacy and security. That said, I like the idea of Signal, but don't use it at all. The reasons are straightforward. It's not as good as Telegram in UX/UI/features. It is not multi-platform (I don't like installing Chrome/Chromium just to add Signal). Worst of all, it doesn't have multi-device message sync (like Wire does, even with end-to-end encryption).
Ok, fine, I could learn to live with those limitations and quirkiness. But far worse than all of the above is the fact that if you change devices (at least on iOS), you start with a blank slate [1] because Signal's developers refuse to allow data backups and restores (encrypted ones through iTunes on a computer or plain backups on iCloud). [2] The application does not allow backups of the data because the developers have actively restricted it! Not everyone is capable of creating a PR or forking it. The people who did take the time to file it as an issue or a request have been told it won't be done or the issues left unresponded to or locked for further commenting. Anyone interested in what's been happening on this particular issue can visit https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues , search for "backup" and look at the open and closed issues over the past few years.
I feel bad to say this, but without a minimally decent UX, which Signal does not provide IMO, I can't recommend it to anyone. People don't expect to lose all previous chats and conversations when they buy a new phone. Quoting a line from the blog post, albeit out of context, that's not "We want to enable online social interactions that are rich and expressive in all the ways that people desire" means - not to me personally.
[1]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/212476798
[2]: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/2290
I'm all for privacy and security. That said, I like the idea of Signal, but don't use it at all. The reasons are straightforward. It's not as good as Telegram in UX/UI/features. It is not multi-platform (I don't like installing Chrome/Chromium just to add Signal). Worst of all, it doesn't have multi-device message sync (like Wire does, even with end-to-end encryption).
Ok, fine, I could learn to live with those limitations and quirkiness. But far worse than all of the above is the fact that if you change devices (at least on iOS), you start with a blank slate [1] because Signal's developers refuse to allow data backups and restores (encrypted ones through iTunes on a computer or plain backups on iCloud). [2] The application does not allow backups of the data because the developers have actively restricted it! Not everyone is capable of creating a PR or forking it. The people who did take the time to file it as an issue or a request have been told it won't be done or the issues left unresponded to or locked for further commenting. Anyone interested in what's been happening on this particular issue can visit https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues , search for "backup" and look at the open and closed issues over the past few years.
I feel bad to say this, but without a minimally decent UX, which Signal does not provide IMO, I can't recommend it to anyone. People don't expect to lose all previous chats and conversations when they buy a new phone. Quoting a line from the blog post, albeit out of context, that's not "We want to enable online social interactions that are rich and expressive in all the ways that people desire" means - not to me personally.
[1]: https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/212476798
[2]: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/2290
This is definitely interesting (and probably the first end-user-valuable SGX-on-server application I've seen), but there are two issues IMO:
1) Intel SGX isn't really capable of resisting moderately serious physical side channel attacks by someone with physical proximity or access to the server. It's decent for low-value, or widely deployed apps where compromise of a single instance only hurts once user, but for a central singular service, less so. Inferior to, say, a conventional HSM with code run inside it. (SGX would be great for client-side stuff, or for, say, a Tor or multi-server VPN server array, which is something I worked on using TXT before.)
2) Intel's still a gatekeeper on what SGX applications can be meaningfully distributed; to run in release-mode, you need a key signed by them, and to get this requires a commercial agreement. If you run in debug or pre-release, anyone with a debugger can pull keys.
If Intel were to fix the latter (even if it cost, say, $100 to get the signing rights, or some non-discriminatory "you must do X, Y and not A, B" were published), the former wouldn't be a deal-killer for some things. If the server operator were a mostly-trusted third party (e.g. a cloud provider), and the people writing and signing the code were never able to get physical access to the hardware, it might work a lot better in most server threat models.
In Signal's particular case it's probably true that most Signal users trust Moxie/OWS, and this is really about putting a much higher bar in place for government compulsion to tamper with or disclose the contact info, so this is a net win.
1) Intel SGX isn't really capable of resisting moderately serious physical side channel attacks by someone with physical proximity or access to the server. It's decent for low-value, or widely deployed apps where compromise of a single instance only hurts once user, but for a central singular service, less so. Inferior to, say, a conventional HSM with code run inside it. (SGX would be great for client-side stuff, or for, say, a Tor or multi-server VPN server array, which is something I worked on using TXT before.)
2) Intel's still a gatekeeper on what SGX applications can be meaningfully distributed; to run in release-mode, you need a key signed by them, and to get this requires a commercial agreement. If you run in debug or pre-release, anyone with a debugger can pull keys.
If Intel were to fix the latter (even if it cost, say, $100 to get the signing rights, or some non-discriminatory "you must do X, Y and not A, B" were published), the former wouldn't be a deal-killer for some things. If the server operator were a mostly-trusted third party (e.g. a cloud provider), and the people writing and signing the code were never able to get physical access to the hardware, it might work a lot better in most server threat models.
In Signal's particular case it's probably true that most Signal users trust Moxie/OWS, and this is really about putting a much higher bar in place for government compulsion to tamper with or disclose the contact info, so this is a net win.
From what I can tell, it's worse than just Intel being a gatekeeper - every execution of "remote attestation" essentially relies upon the Intel Attestation Service to actually perform verification (or at least as the certificate authority). In a (hypothetical) world where all of Intel's security features are owned by the US intelligence community, this type of pattern seems like an awesome vector for deception ("false sense of security"), where surveillance groups have a large supply of Intel-certified EPID keys, which they can use to arbitrarily fool remote-attestation clients. It's concerning to me that the OP article doesn't even mention Intel's highly trusted role in this process.
What do you mean by moderately serious. Side channels are mostly a software level issue. SGX doesn't try to solve them at the moment. If you mean attack the hardware security in general that'd require decapping the chip itself, right?
In case someone from Open WhisperSystems is reading: please add stickers. Seriously, I know so many people who are on Telegram just because of its sticker system and won't consider anything without that feature. This comes up again and again in online discussions where Signal is mentioned, and it hurts to see all the care and effort the OWS team has put into providing real security rejected out of hand because of it.
For the uninitiated, stickers are essentially a UI layer on top of image sending. Each user has a collection of stickers which they can add images to. This collection can be scrolled through quickly and any sticker can be sent to a chat with a tap, like a sort of custom emoji. Other users who see a sticker can add it to their own local collection by tapping on the sticker message. I see no technical reason why this couldn't be built on top of the Signal Protocol.
For the uninitiated, stickers are essentially a UI layer on top of image sending. Each user has a collection of stickers which they can add images to. This collection can be scrolled through quickly and any sticker can be sent to a chat with a tap, like a sort of custom emoji. Other users who see a sticker can add it to their own local collection by tapping on the sticker message. I see no technical reason why this couldn't be built on top of the Signal Protocol.
Signal needs a desktop app that doesn't suck too... Wire, WhatsApp, and Telegram all have very decent desktop apps. And WhatsApp is default end-to-end now - and I think Wire is even for groups... Had some call quality issues with Signal and started using WhatsApp again - and will test Wire for calls soon.
I find it really unfortunate that this is stopping people from adopting Signal.
However, I believe that this feature was added last year:
https://signal.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/
However, I believe that this feature was added last year:
https://signal.org/blog/doodles-stickers-censorship/
No, that's a different feature with the same name. That allows you to quickly layer graphics from a built-in set on top of existing photos, like in Snapchat. The "stickers" I'm referring to, in the Telegram/WeChat/LINE sense, are essentially custom emojis, or macros for sending one of a collection of reaction images as its own message.
https://telegram.org/blog/stickers-revolution
Various communities absolutely rely on this style of communication, so it becomes a dealbreaking feature.
https://telegram.org/blog/stickers-revolution
Various communities absolutely rely on this style of communication, so it becomes a dealbreaking feature.
I'm not criticizing you when you say that you need stickers, but please help me understand: how do you rely on stickers to communicate?
I can understand them being a nice UI/UX feature that makes the app more fun, but I cannot possibly imagine that people actually rely on stickers to communicate.
Maybe you mean something different and I'm misunderstanding you?
I can understand them being a nice UI/UX feature that makes the app more fun, but I cannot possibly imagine that people actually rely on stickers to communicate.
Maybe you mean something different and I'm misunderstanding you?
Not me as an individual, but various communities I'm in contact with have stickers ingrained into their culture and social norms. People collect up to hundreds of stickers for different situations, make their own based on shared iconography, and some even have custom stickers commissioned from artists, of themselves, of characters they've created, etc. For groups that are really invested in stickers, migrating to an app which lacks them would significantly alter their dynamics.
You don't understand. I live for stickers on Telegram. It's an essential part of communication for millions. This is not a joke. Especially in Asia
To succinctly convey emotions, opinions, viewpoints, "feels". To simply have a non-verbal vocabulary, to have a different quality to certain parts of the communication, to signify a different quality of seriousness/playfulness/feeling.
It's the new emoticon. :-)
It's the new emoticon. :-)
I'm curious, are they used anything like memes that you can easily send more than once?
Not sure what you mean by "like memes". They are just funny images with thousands of variations that you can send. If you're going to sleep - send something cute that shows it.
Some examples http://www.line-stickers.com/
Some examples http://www.line-stickers.com/
The only thing I could see that would potentially top this would be talking animated emoji....The feces one comes to mind specifically
It it talks, it takes too much time to parse, and it becomes too specific.
Pictures, maybe with a max 0.5 sec animation are okay, and no sound. (At least that's my hunch.)
Pictures, maybe with a max 0.5 sec animation are okay, and no sound. (At least that's my hunch.)
I use some of them to communicate moods, or recurring ideas that are bothersome to enunciate over text.
E.g. these:
https://stickers.acidodivertido.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
E.g. these:
https://stickers.acidodivertido.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/...
If you pass links to known sticker images, and the recipient has to retrieve them by means outside the Signal protocol, that reduces security. An observer can detect when a receiver fetches a sticker image, and they can tell which one. For example, noting that a message has forced the loading of collection "Gay"[1] provides much useful information to an observer.
[1] http://chpic.su/en/stickers/Gayer/
[1] http://chpic.su/en/stickers/Gayer/
So send them entirely inline. Sending a sticker is not fundamentally different from sending an image that isn't called a "sticker".
Having to send stickers every time ups the overhead. Also, if stickers are well known variable length files, it may be possible to make good guesses about which stickers are attached.
You could negotiate sticker sending by hash: the first message only contains the hash value, if the recipient already has that sticker stored, it can be displayed immediately. Otherwise the full data can be requested.
EDIT: That scheme can be used to probe whether or not someone already has a specific sticker stored, so it might have to be separated per-contact to avoid leakage.
EDIT: That scheme can be used to probe whether or not someone already has a specific sticker stored, so it might have to be separated per-contact to avoid leakage.
Thank you. It only took me a couple of years in East Asia to start feeling frustrated by the lack of nuanced, instant and effortless communication provided by stickers when I message over Signal. I, too, have many friends who would otherwise consider Signal and instead stick with LINE and Messenger for this reason.
Is this referring to the same type of "sticker" I hear about in iMessage? Because I still have no idea what those are about, but I hear people talking about them all the time.
That looks kinda similar, except it seems iMessage allows you to slap stickers in arbitrary positions on top of other messages, whereas the implementations I'm thinking of just treat a sticker as its own message. Also Apple has some sort of sticker store and approval process, whereas on Telegram for example anyone can add their own image files for use as stickers.
You can already send arbitrary images and attachments in Signal messages.
Sure, but compared to the stickers UI paradigm it's far clunkier to browse for an image file every time and to collect and arrange image files sent by other people, particularly on a mobile device.
Also, stickers display with proper transparency, giving them the appearance of arbitrary shapes, whereas images on Signal are displayed in a rectangular frame and transparent areas get a black background.
Compare:
https://image.ibb.co/niKWUQ/IMG_20170926_135611.jpg
with:
https://preview.ibb.co/fg21UQ/IMG_20170926_135627.jpg
It may seem trivial, but this matters to people in the real world.
Also, stickers display with proper transparency, giving them the appearance of arbitrary shapes, whereas images on Signal are displayed in a rectangular frame and transparent areas get a black background.
Compare:
https://image.ibb.co/niKWUQ/IMG_20170926_135611.jpg
with:
https://preview.ibb.co/fg21UQ/IMG_20170926_135627.jpg
It may seem trivial, but this matters to people in the real world.
LINE even autocompletes with stickers! Writing "happy" will show a list of suggested stickers to send.
Using this feature instead of stickers is like using imageboard on your phone.
In case someone from Open WhisperSystems is reading: please do NOT add stickers and junk to your clean and pretty system. I know a lot of people that would leave the service if it turned into WeChat (including me). Stick to the fundamental engineering of privacy as you are doing, and forget the gimmicks.
I think this is an unhelpful suggestion. It seems to me that you're advocating that the developers take an approach which will give them a smaller install base in favor of engineering focus on privacy and security. But communicating privately and securely with someone is impossible if they aren't also using the app.
This is the same problem with PGP/GPG -- it may be incredibly secure, but if no one uses it, it doesn't matter.
Obtusely refusing to use a good system which has broad appeal is working contrary to your own goals.
This is the same problem with PGP/GPG -- it may be incredibly secure, but if no one uses it, it doesn't matter.
Obtusely refusing to use a good system which has broad appeal is working contrary to your own goals.
Perhaps it could have an opt-in system, where stickers don't work unless both sides in the conversation enable the feature.
I don't understand your motivation here. Every time I advocate using Signal I run into a wall of "but it doesn't have stickers"; for those users, all the privacy engineering is moot if the app doesn't fill their needs. Adding another attachment type would do nothing to degrade your experience, nor would it turn Signal into WeChat.
What do you imagine is the point of proselytizing the use of secure apps to people for whom this is a concern that would override security? They aren't likely to adhere to secure practices anyways, so it's moot.
Moxie has stated in the past that the goal of Signal is not to cater to "security people" but to "make mass surveillance impossible".
It does degrade it tho. There have to be ui elements to interact with them, you need to be up to date on packs, a market needs to be implemented, maybe payment needs to be introduced, the chat looks ugly full of graphics, etc. Plus, every feature adds vectors of attack and things to maintain. I want this to be a Snowden'ish tool for adults, not giffy. I'm not saying my preferences are any better than yours, just highlighting that there are varied preferences out there. If signal started looking like WeChat or Messenger I'd probably leave.
> you need to be up to date on packs, a market needs to be implemented, maybe payment needs to be introduced
You don't need any of that. Certainly none of that is present in Telegram. I don't think you read my original comment in full.
> I want this to be a Snowden'ish tool for adults, not giffy.
Ironically Signal already has Giphy integration, but I suppose you didn't notice because you don't use it—as would be the case with stickers.
You don't need any of that. Certainly none of that is present in Telegram. I don't think you read my original comment in full.
> I want this to be a Snowden'ish tool for adults, not giffy.
Ironically Signal already has Giphy integration, but I suppose you didn't notice because you don't use it—as would be the case with stickers.
> I want this to be a Snowden'ish tool for adults, not giffy.
Not sure how you could be more condescending here.
Look, I get it. I don't use stickers on messaging apps that support them, and I don't have a "GIF keyboard" or whatever. But plenty of actual adults use them and like them, and don't consider a messaging experience complete without them.
If Signal's goal is to be a niche messaging platform that only hyper-privacy/security-conscious people use, then by all means, leave out the user-fun features that the masses want. But if they actually want to raise the bar for mass-market security and privacy, those features are essential. Maybe that's "lame"or "childish" to you, but that's just how it is.
If the addition of stickers makes you leave the platform, then that's certainly a loss for you and those like you, but it's a huge win for the much-larger group of people who will be attracted to the service.
Not sure how you could be more condescending here.
Look, I get it. I don't use stickers on messaging apps that support them, and I don't have a "GIF keyboard" or whatever. But plenty of actual adults use them and like them, and don't consider a messaging experience complete without them.
If Signal's goal is to be a niche messaging platform that only hyper-privacy/security-conscious people use, then by all means, leave out the user-fun features that the masses want. But if they actually want to raise the bar for mass-market security and privacy, those features are essential. Maybe that's "lame"or "childish" to you, but that's just how it is.
If the addition of stickers makes you leave the platform, then that's certainly a loss for you and those like you, but it's a huge win for the much-larger group of people who will be attracted to the service.
> I know a lot of people that would leave the service if it turned into WeChat (including me).
Where will they go? To some less secure alternative simply because of stickers?
Where will they go? To some less secure alternative simply because of stickers?
In my opinion the signal ios client is significantly less polished than the telegram client. I could convince my girlfriend to switch to telegram, after she found signal to be intolerable on her android device as well.
> In my opinion the signal ios client is significantly less polished than the telegram client. I could convince my girlfriend to switch to telegram, after she found signal to be intolerable on her android device as well.
My reaction is the opposite. I love the signal iOS app because it doesn't try to do SMS. It lets you enter the code which is great if I want to use a Google Voice number instead of a carrier number (and I don't forward Google Voice texts to the carriers). I am not a fan of SMS fallback and I am glad I get the "Enable Signal for SMS" on Android as opposed to just sending a text.
My reaction is the opposite. I love the signal iOS app because it doesn't try to do SMS. It lets you enter the code which is great if I want to use a Google Voice number instead of a carrier number (and I don't forward Google Voice texts to the carriers). I am not a fan of SMS fallback and I am glad I get the "Enable Signal for SMS" on Android as opposed to just sending a text.
You think the Signal app is more polished than the Telegram app?!
I have very limited experience with Telegram. I was comparing Signal for iOS vs Signal for Android. Sorry for the confusion.
[deleted]
Couldn't you just not send any stickers?
Signal is applying SGX secure enclaves to engineer a new contact discovery server design. This is doubtlessly promising and innovative.
My only question is the following: what protection is there against the server sending a correct remote attestation for the code being executed to the client, and then, right after this attestation is validated, the server rerouting the network pipe so that the contact list the client sends goes to a different server running different, non-SGX code?
I ask that as a non-expert in SGX, so this might be something that has an obvious answer.
Edited to add: Also, isn't it the case that verifying SGX remote attestations requires phoning home to Intel? If that's the case here (and I'm not sure that it is,) is Intel consequently able to build an IP address graph of Signal users?
Edit 2: Matthew Green has provided a credible answer to my initial question: https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/91274558241391820...
My only question is the following: what protection is there against the server sending a correct remote attestation for the code being executed to the client, and then, right after this attestation is validated, the server rerouting the network pipe so that the contact list the client sends goes to a different server running different, non-SGX code?
I ask that as a non-expert in SGX, so this might be something that has an obvious answer.
Edited to add: Also, isn't it the case that verifying SGX remote attestations requires phoning home to Intel? If that's the case here (and I'm not sure that it is,) is Intel consequently able to build an IP address graph of Signal users?
Edit 2: Matthew Green has provided a credible answer to my initial question: https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/91274558241391820...
> My only question is the following: what protection is there against the server sending a correct remote attestation for the code being executed to the client, and then, right after this attestation is validated, the server rerouting the network pipe so that the contact list the client sends goes to a different server running different, non-SGX code?
The same thing that prevents contacting an HTTPS server and having your connection re-routed after verifying the server certificate: the code elsewhere (e.g. outside the enclave) doesn't have the keys.
The same thing that prevents contacting an HTTPS server and having your connection re-routed after verifying the server certificate: the code elsewhere (e.g. outside the enclave) doesn't have the keys.
That makes sense. In this case I think it would be interesting to analyze the state space for the network protocol involved.
I don't really understand why this is an improvement on the existing architecture.
In the current contact discovery implementation you need to fully trust the server, namely the open source component that is the contact discovery service.
In this proposed new implementation, you still have to trust the server; you need to trust closed source processor hardware offering the Software Guard Extensions.
Those extensions need necessarily be kept away from user control, because otherwise you could pretend to attest a particular program, while actually running a different program. So this encourages a centralization of trust into a private key managed by processor manufacturers, which with server hardware is primarily Intel.
(note that you fully need to trust the processor hardware in both cases; I'm only arguing that this scheme possibly isn't an improvement)
Could anyone shed some light onto why this is an improvement, assuming you don't trust the CPU manufacturer? This is kind of the premise of the article, which notes that "more fundamentally for us, we simply don’t want people to have to trust us", "that’s not what privacy is about".
In the current contact discovery implementation you need to fully trust the server, namely the open source component that is the contact discovery service.
In this proposed new implementation, you still have to trust the server; you need to trust closed source processor hardware offering the Software Guard Extensions.
Those extensions need necessarily be kept away from user control, because otherwise you could pretend to attest a particular program, while actually running a different program. So this encourages a centralization of trust into a private key managed by processor manufacturers, which with server hardware is primarily Intel.
(note that you fully need to trust the processor hardware in both cases; I'm only arguing that this scheme possibly isn't an improvement)
Could anyone shed some light onto why this is an improvement, assuming you don't trust the CPU manufacturer? This is kind of the premise of the article, which notes that "more fundamentally for us, we simply don’t want people to have to trust us", "that’s not what privacy is about".
I am by no means an SGX expert, but my understanding has been that it allows you to shorten the "trust stack."
What you're referring to as "the server" is really a technology stack that starts with the CPU hardware and extends to the service operator. Without SGX, the trust stack probably looks something like: Intel, the OS, the VM, the cloud provider (Amazon, Google, Microsoft), the server software, the server operator.
Any of those points on the trust stack can be compromised by their principals or by an attacker (for example, Amazon could choose to interfere with Signal, or someone could hack Amazon and do the same). This is true for the OS, the software, the service provider, and everything else in the stack. Users have to trust all of those points, and additionally trust them not to be compromised.
SGX shortens the trust stack all the way down to the CPU. It takes the OS, the VM, the cloud provider, the service operator, and everything else out of the equation. Clients no longer have to trust any of them, either to be honest or to avoid compromise.
If trusting the CPU isn't acceptable to you, then that might be a bigger problem than you realize, since all computing has to. If you'd rather put your trust in AES, the problem is that you still have to trust the CPU to perform AES the way you would like it to.
What you're referring to as "the server" is really a technology stack that starts with the CPU hardware and extends to the service operator. Without SGX, the trust stack probably looks something like: Intel, the OS, the VM, the cloud provider (Amazon, Google, Microsoft), the server software, the server operator.
Any of those points on the trust stack can be compromised by their principals or by an attacker (for example, Amazon could choose to interfere with Signal, or someone could hack Amazon and do the same). This is true for the OS, the software, the service provider, and everything else in the stack. Users have to trust all of those points, and additionally trust them not to be compromised.
SGX shortens the trust stack all the way down to the CPU. It takes the OS, the VM, the cloud provider, the service operator, and everything else out of the equation. Clients no longer have to trust any of them, either to be honest or to avoid compromise.
If trusting the CPU isn't acceptable to you, then that might be a bigger problem than you realize, since all computing has to. If you'd rather put your trust in AES, the problem is that you still have to trust the CPU to perform AES the way you would like it to.
I understand that you will have to trust the CPU to do any computation. In a sense, it indeed shortens the 'trust stack', and as said in another comment "now, you need only trust that Intel hasn't backdoored their hardware".
Maybe the main point should have been that that this scheme "encourages a centralization of trust into a private key managed by processor manufacturers". You might say that by integrating SGX mechanisms into your security model, you create a set of 'feudal lords' [1] which can wield their power over you.
A manufacturer may legitimately establish an enclave in you most trusted hardware which you may not audit or even measure. And if that security model becomes commonplace, for example when only allowing Widevine DRM inside SGX, you eventually cannot use your self-chosen hardware, but will have to pick a feudal lord.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feuda...
Maybe the main point should have been that that this scheme "encourages a centralization of trust into a private key managed by processor manufacturers". You might say that by integrating SGX mechanisms into your security model, you create a set of 'feudal lords' [1] which can wield their power over you.
A manufacturer may legitimately establish an enclave in you most trusted hardware which you may not audit or even measure. And if that security model becomes commonplace, for example when only allowing Widevine DRM inside SGX, you eventually cannot use your self-chosen hardware, but will have to pick a feudal lord.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/more_on_feuda...
There is a difference between trusting a local and a remote CPU. Selling compromised CPU's to end users is much riskier than colluding with a megacorp to create "altered" CPU's for their servers.
A problem I see a lot in this community when it comes to security is letting perfect be the enemy of good.
Yes, this is vulnerable to an effort by Intel, but that's still a significant increase in complexity and capital required to pull of an attack. Really, "still vulnerable to malicious insertion by the hardware vendor" is probably one of the most positive things you can say about a security system, as generally, especially when it comes to privacy, there are many attack vectors that are _so much easier_. For instance, OWS itself.
The improvement here is reducing the attack surface. Yes, that doesn't look like an improvement if you choose to look only at the particular part of the attack surface that this change doesn't address. But in real terms it is a substantial improvement.
Yes, this is vulnerable to an effort by Intel, but that's still a significant increase in complexity and capital required to pull of an attack. Really, "still vulnerable to malicious insertion by the hardware vendor" is probably one of the most positive things you can say about a security system, as generally, especially when it comes to privacy, there are many attack vectors that are _so much easier_. For instance, OWS itself.
The improvement here is reducing the attack surface. Yes, that doesn't look like an improvement if you choose to look only at the particular part of the attack surface that this change doesn't address. But in real terms it is a substantial improvement.
SGX attestation involves a key burned into e-fuses on processors at manufacture; the process was designed to prevent Intel from being able to derive keys used for individual enclaves. Obviously, Intel could have a malicious manufacturing process --- but then, that's the case for any piece of merchant silicon you'd use to build any computer.
If I'm reading the documentation [1][2] correctly, you're overselling the security. Verifying an SGX attestation requires trusting not only the integrity of the per-processor secret keys, but the honesty of an Intel-provided online verification API.
The API allows you to POST an attestation report to Intel's verification web service, and get back a response saying "OK" or "not OK". You can use TLS to verify that the authentication was done by Intel rather than a MITM, but there seems to be no cryptographic way to prevent Intel from simply lying to you. They don't offer any way for third-parties to verify attestation reports themselves. [3]
Is there something I'm misunderstanding?
[1]: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-gua...
[2]: https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/ac/40...
[3]: https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-software-guard...
The API allows you to POST an attestation report to Intel's verification web service, and get back a response saying "OK" or "not OK". You can use TLS to verify that the authentication was done by Intel rather than a MITM, but there seems to be no cryptographic way to prevent Intel from simply lying to you. They don't offer any way for third-parties to verify attestation reports themselves. [3]
Is there something I'm misunderstanding?
[1]: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-gua...
[2]: https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/ac/40...
[3]: https://software.intel.com/en-us/forums/intel-software-guard...
Can you describe which API you're even talking about? This one?
> "The Attestation Service verifies the validity of the platform. It is the responsibility of the Service Provider to validate the ISV enclave identity."
This API gives back considerably more than just an "OK" or "not OK". It gives back an attestation verification report (see section 4.2.1 of https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/7e/3b...)
But beyond that, as noted in the document, this is Intel certifying that the attestation was created by genuine Intel hardware. It also carries a data-at-rest signature in addition to TLS:
> "The Attestation Verification Report is cryptographically signed by Report Signing Key (owned by the Attestation Service) using the RSA-SHA256 algorithm. The signature is calculated over the entire body of the HTTP response."
What Intel is providing here is not too far off from OCSP: the main things that can go wrong with "isvEnclaveQuoteStatus" beyond messages being malformed or signed by untrusted keys are the keys being revoked.
An OCSP server could just as easily lie to you about the revocation status of an X.509 certificate. C'est la vie.
/attestation/sgx/v1/report
> "The Attestation Service verifies the validity of the platform. It is the responsibility of the Service Provider to validate the ISV enclave identity."
This API gives back considerably more than just an "OK" or "not OK". It gives back an attestation verification report (see section 4.2.1 of https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/7e/3b...)
But beyond that, as noted in the document, this is Intel certifying that the attestation was created by genuine Intel hardware. It also carries a data-at-rest signature in addition to TLS:
> "The Attestation Verification Report is cryptographically signed by Report Signing Key (owned by the Attestation Service) using the RSA-SHA256 algorithm. The signature is calculated over the entire body of the HTTP response."
What Intel is providing here is not too far off from OCSP: the main things that can go wrong with "isvEnclaveQuoteStatus" beyond messages being malformed or signed by untrusted keys are the keys being revoked.
An OCSP server could just as easily lie to you about the revocation status of an X.509 certificate. C'est la vie.
I did see that document, and I don't see how it addresses the underlying trust issue. Again, I don't claim to be super-knowledgeable about this stuff, which is why I asked if I'm missing something.
> If so, perhaps you missed this: "The Attestation Service verifies the validity of the platform. ..."
No, I didn't miss it. The Attestation Service claims to "verify" the validity of the platform, but it provides no proof of that verification. And if the platform is not valid (i.e. not verified to be using an authentic Intel key) then it doesn't matter what other checks you do; the security of the entire system falls apart, because the supposedly "secure" enclave could actually be being emulated.
> It also carries a data-at-rest signature in addition to TLS:
That's a signature generated by the Attestation Service, not by the original processor. It's generated using a "Report Signing Key" which has no cryptographic relationship with the processor's keys, or with the signature of the attestation; it just tells you that Intel claims to have checked that attestation and found it to be valid.
> An OCSP server could just as easily lie to you about the revocation status of an X.509 certificate. C'est la vie.
Right, this system seems as weak as OCSP, in the sense that it can be easily compromised by (for instance) a court order to modify the behavior of Intel's verification API. That's much weaker than the original claim, which was that it could be compromised only by tampering with the processors during manufacture. (Not to mention, the TLS certificate infrastructure would be vastly less secure if browsers had to rely entirely on OCSP and couldn't do any certificate validation of their own. OCSP can lie about revocation, but it can't lie about the signature itself.)
I'll add that v1 of the reporting API seems to have been even weaker than OCSP. In that version, the signed response didn't even include any identifying information about the request, so if Intel faked a response, you wouldn't even be able to prove it to a third party! Thankfully, v2 seems to have fixed this obvious oversight.
> If so, perhaps you missed this: "The Attestation Service verifies the validity of the platform. ..."
No, I didn't miss it. The Attestation Service claims to "verify" the validity of the platform, but it provides no proof of that verification. And if the platform is not valid (i.e. not verified to be using an authentic Intel key) then it doesn't matter what other checks you do; the security of the entire system falls apart, because the supposedly "secure" enclave could actually be being emulated.
> It also carries a data-at-rest signature in addition to TLS:
That's a signature generated by the Attestation Service, not by the original processor. It's generated using a "Report Signing Key" which has no cryptographic relationship with the processor's keys, or with the signature of the attestation; it just tells you that Intel claims to have checked that attestation and found it to be valid.
> An OCSP server could just as easily lie to you about the revocation status of an X.509 certificate. C'est la vie.
Right, this system seems as weak as OCSP, in the sense that it can be easily compromised by (for instance) a court order to modify the behavior of Intel's verification API. That's much weaker than the original claim, which was that it could be compromised only by tampering with the processors during manufacture. (Not to mention, the TLS certificate infrastructure would be vastly less secure if browsers had to rely entirely on OCSP and couldn't do any certificate validation of their own. OCSP can lie about revocation, but it can't lie about the signature itself.)
I'll add that v1 of the reporting API seems to have been even weaker than OCSP. In that version, the signed response didn't even include any identifying information about the request, so if Intel faked a response, you wouldn't even be able to prove it to a third party! Thankfully, v2 seems to have fixed this obvious oversight.
In the end this system is just a PKI, albeit one based on a "privacy preserving" scheme based on bilinear pairings. It has all of the same failings as any PKI. They aren't going to do any better than OCSP.
> the entire system falls apart, because the supposedly "secure" enclave could actually be being emulated.
I'm not sure what else you're expecting? Even if the signatures were cryptographically verifiable end-to-end (which I believe is still on Intel's roadmap, but in the meantime they have centralized revocation) Intel could still issue an attestation certificate for a malicious enclave which is in fact a white box software emulation of an enclave, and you'd be none the wiser.
There is no magical way for Intel to provide a mathematical statement that a device is a genuine Intel CPU. You are trusting the hardware and the key management to do what Intel says on the box.
> the entire system falls apart, because the supposedly "secure" enclave could actually be being emulated.
I'm not sure what else you're expecting? Even if the signatures were cryptographically verifiable end-to-end (which I believe is still on Intel's roadmap, but in the meantime they have centralized revocation) Intel could still issue an attestation certificate for a malicious enclave which is in fact a white box software emulation of an enclave, and you'd be none the wiser.
There is no magical way for Intel to provide a mathematical statement that a device is a genuine Intel CPU. You are trusting the hardware and the key management to do what Intel says on the box.
Of course the Intel could lie to you, but Intel is already in the TCB. If you don't trust Intel to correctly verify the attestation report, you probably never trusted any kind of SGX security guarantees in the first place, as they also depend on you trusting Intel to do the thing they claim to do.
There's certainly a difference of degree between, on the one hand, distributing to every customer hardware that doesn't do what they say it does, and on the other, providing a limited number of false attestations of a particular emulation of the SGX hardware.
[deleted]
Don't "trust us" is not the same thing as you don't have trust anyone.
Before this, you had to trust Open Whisper Systems was not coerced and that Intel had not been coerced into backdooring their hardware.
Now, you need only trust that Intel hasn't backdoored their hardware.
Its not perfect, but its better. Especially since its entirely plausible, from a legal perspective, that Open Whisper Systems might be compelled to record any contact data they get. It is comparatively less plausible that a court might compel Intel to backdoor their code in order to enable an order against Open Whisper Systems. And that is what would have to happen here.
Before this, you had to trust Open Whisper Systems was not coerced and that Intel had not been coerced into backdooring their hardware.
Now, you need only trust that Intel hasn't backdoored their hardware.
Its not perfect, but its better. Especially since its entirely plausible, from a legal perspective, that Open Whisper Systems might be compelled to record any contact data they get. It is comparatively less plausible that a court might compel Intel to backdoor their code in order to enable an order against Open Whisper Systems. And that is what would have to happen here.
And you still need to trust the client. There is nothing stoppting them from slipping you a compromized client via Android Play Store update.
The only way around this would be to have many implementations - but AFAIK they don't allow third party clients to connect.
The only way around this would be to have many implementations - but AFAIK they don't allow third party clients to connect.
Cool idea. When I read the title I thought that maybe they have discovered a practical private information retrieval method or some oblivious transfer-based method after all since their 2014 blog post (well, they kinda do something like that with oblivious accesses to the RAM I guess), but using the secure enclaves for running verifiable code seems like a very pragmatic and creative solution too.
Granted, how secure those enclaves against state-level attackers also remains to be seen (that recent attack on ARM Trustzone was pretty cool and effective), but it surely is an improvement after all if you want some defense in depth.
Granted, how secure those enclaves against state-level attackers also remains to be seen (that recent attack on ARM Trustzone was pretty cool and effective), but it surely is an improvement after all if you want some defense in depth.
"practical private information retrieval"
For single-server PIR that is almost certainly an impossibility, since no matter what sort of techniques you use you must scan the entire database on every request (there may be some batching that can be done if several requests are from the same user, but if you have millions of users that is not terribly helpful). Multi-server PIR is already practical, but deployment is a bit difficult: who will be the other server? How will you ensure the other server's database is synchronized with yours?
For single-server PIR that is almost certainly an impossibility, since no matter what sort of techniques you use you must scan the entire database on every request (there may be some batching that can be done if several requests are from the same user, but if you have millions of users that is not terribly helpful). Multi-server PIR is already practical, but deployment is a bit difficult: who will be the other server? How will you ensure the other server's database is synchronized with yours?
It is actually really neat how DRM tech is being reversed to benefit the consumer and privacy for once!
Almost daily you read about yet another new "innocent" tech being exploited and used for some corporate gain, taking advantage of the end-users. It's refreshing to see it go the other way!
Almost daily you read about yet another new "innocent" tech being exploited and used for some corporate gain, taking advantage of the end-users. It's refreshing to see it go the other way!
Trusted computing, TPMs etc have always been about this scenario. It's just the anti DRM crowd has some people that think the end user is always the person sitting in front of the terminal, and there should never be a way to reduce that person's access.
> It's just the anti DRM crowd has some people that think the end user is always the person sitting in front of the terminal, and there should never be a way to reduce that person's access.
That may be extreme (if it's not a strawman), but a major problem with TPM is that there is no way to give control to the end-user, with the possible exception of customers large enough to demand hardware customization.
That may be extreme (if it's not a strawman), but a major problem with TPM is that there is no way to give control to the end-user, with the possible exception of customers large enough to demand hardware customization.
TPMs are similar. Initially, there was a lot of resistance to them (for fear of DRM, etc.) but over time we've realized that we can put them to good use after all.
When will I be able to sign up without a phone number? The phone number requirement is ridiculous and makes true anonymity incredibly difficult.
I don't think anonymity is one of Signal's design goals-- privacy is. But fwiw there is also Wire Messenger, which looks to me to be a kind of Signal w/o the phone # requirement (you can use an email address). It claims to use the signal (axolotl double ratchet) algorithm for texts and video/audio uses webrtc https://wire.com/en/privacy/ with encryption and it's GPL'd.
Beyond that I haven't used it so can't vouch for it. Anyone else got an opinion on this Swiss app?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wire
Beyond that I haven't used it so can't vouch for it. Anyone else got an opinion on this Swiss app?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wire
Anonymity is not the only reason for usernames though: People sometimes switch phone numbers, and some switch them more often than others (exchange/phd students going to different countries/, moving to different countries for new jobs etc).
Re: Wire, I tried it back when it had video chat (one of the few options between iPhone and Android) and Signal didn't. But I found Wire to be too unstable to be really usable. That is to say, my family members quickly got annoyed and demanded I buy an iPhone. Signal video chat solved that issue :-)
Re: Wire, I tried it back when it had video chat (one of the few options between iPhone and Android) and Signal didn't. But I found Wire to be too unstable to be really usable. That is to say, my family members quickly got annoyed and demanded I buy an iPhone. Signal video chat solved that issue :-)
This. They had a (hopefully non-technical) justification for this but it's of course completely unnecessary. Your identity could just as easily be a username or a random key. If you need to share that identity you could always do it out of band.
I tried to use Signal and even gave it permission to use my contacts when I installed it. Once it found the handful of people I know using it I disabled those permissions. To my surprise, the app refused to let me use it. That's when I uninstalled it and stopped recommending it to people.
How they operate makes me think they're trying to build the illusion of security above all else (possibly with nefarious purposes?) or they're more concerned about driving up their user #s than they are about providing security.
Despite what security consultants like to tell people, end to end encryption is not rocket science. If you trust the publicly available algorithms (if you don't then this is moot) then it's relatively straightforward to assemble a system that should be secure over the wire.
Of course, that requires you to also trust that the app you're installing is using the same source as the one you vetted (or wrote) and that your device / computer hasn't been compromised somehow. Ditto the person you're talking to. You can trust the whole chain if you want but currently verifying it is impossible.
I like to do a thought experiment about what an actually secure messaging system would look like. The only truly secure system is an air-gapped one. (Yes, there are ways to bridge the air gap if you're in the vicinity, but that's not the point.)
How could you air gap a mobile phone? Well, you can't. What you could do is use a second phone with the radios physically disabled. You could then use this to encrypt your messages and then type those encrypted messages into email or SMS or whatever.
This is a bit laborious so you could send the encrypted info to the second phone and to a second app that brokers these messages. You could use the analog ports to modem these messages back and forth. Assuming your ADC is just an ADC, the standard analog audio port should not be hackable in any way.
This is a silly example but it's meant to illustrate a point. If you really have something to hide, an app isn't going to get your there. If you just want a little bit of privacy, you're better off with iMessage or whoever is offering end to end encryption. Signal is not a particularly good chat app and no, most of your friends aren't using it anyway.
Obligatory: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2007/01/in_praise_o...
I tried to use Signal and even gave it permission to use my contacts when I installed it. Once it found the handful of people I know using it I disabled those permissions. To my surprise, the app refused to let me use it. That's when I uninstalled it and stopped recommending it to people.
How they operate makes me think they're trying to build the illusion of security above all else (possibly with nefarious purposes?) or they're more concerned about driving up their user #s than they are about providing security.
Despite what security consultants like to tell people, end to end encryption is not rocket science. If you trust the publicly available algorithms (if you don't then this is moot) then it's relatively straightforward to assemble a system that should be secure over the wire.
Of course, that requires you to also trust that the app you're installing is using the same source as the one you vetted (or wrote) and that your device / computer hasn't been compromised somehow. Ditto the person you're talking to. You can trust the whole chain if you want but currently verifying it is impossible.
I like to do a thought experiment about what an actually secure messaging system would look like. The only truly secure system is an air-gapped one. (Yes, there are ways to bridge the air gap if you're in the vicinity, but that's not the point.)
How could you air gap a mobile phone? Well, you can't. What you could do is use a second phone with the radios physically disabled. You could then use this to encrypt your messages and then type those encrypted messages into email or SMS or whatever.
This is a bit laborious so you could send the encrypted info to the second phone and to a second app that brokers these messages. You could use the analog ports to modem these messages back and forth. Assuming your ADC is just an ADC, the standard analog audio port should not be hackable in any way.
This is a silly example but it's meant to illustrate a point. If you really have something to hide, an app isn't going to get your there. If you just want a little bit of privacy, you're better off with iMessage or whoever is offering end to end encryption. Signal is not a particularly good chat app and no, most of your friends aren't using it anyway.
Obligatory: https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2007/01/in_praise_o...
You've been able to use Signal-iOS without contact access for a while.
> "It gets worse! The amount of encrypted RAM available to an enclave is limited to 128MB, which isn’t enough to store a large data set of registered users."
(So they used ORAM)
That's all very neat, but before a 128MB limit scares anyone off from playing with SGX, it's no longer a limit.
As of the Linux SGX SDK v1.9, enclaves can be up to 64GB (31.75GB heap space and 31.625GB buffers). The Baidu Rust SGX SDK supports this, for example:
https://github.com/baidu/rust-sgx-sdk#v020-release
(So they used ORAM)
That's all very neat, but before a 128MB limit scares anyone off from playing with SGX, it's no longer a limit.
As of the Linux SGX SDK v1.9, enclaves can be up to 64GB (31.75GB heap space and 31.625GB buffers). The Baidu Rust SGX SDK supports this, for example:
https://github.com/baidu/rust-sgx-sdk#v020-release
Just to clarify, they didn't use ORAM, but designed a special algorithm for their specific access pattern. In particular, they do a linear scan of the entire user database, whereas ORAM would afford them polylogarithmic running time.
So this looks better than the status quo, but is it really trustless? Couldn't OWS still be compelled to drop something in that walks & talks like this secure enclave, but enables remote collection of address books? It seems we've just moved the trust down the stack into hardware.
Kinda depressed that we seem to have given up on the scalable Private Set Intersection problem. It's a hard problem but an important one for privacy-preserving social apps.
Kinda depressed that we seem to have given up on the scalable Private Set Intersection problem. It's a hard problem but an important one for privacy-preserving social apps.
The point of SGX is that the enclave is cryptographically verifiable. You can't simply emulate the enclave's software and interface; you also have to have the corresponding private key.
So is that key produced and provided by OWS? Or is it an Intel signed key?
Either way, it's far from trustless, but it does provide a benefit in that if the initial setup was done correctly a compromise of OWS servers can no longer result in leaked contact hashes.
Either way, it's far from trustless, but it does provide a benefit in that if the initial setup was done correctly a compromise of OWS servers can no longer result in leaked contact hashes.
The key is created by Intel during CPU manufacturing process. Of course it's not trustless but it shortens the list of companies you have to trust.
Running remote software and attestation that it indeed is what you think without trusting anyone can be... hard.
Running remote software and attestation that it indeed is what you think without trusting anyone can be... hard.
[deleted]
Wait, but the Signal Server does not need to store the contact graph, it stores only (some of) its vertices. Moxie wants to make it hard for somebody to learn about the edges from the way clients ask whether a vertex is in signal's subgraph of the social graph.
Why don't the clients simply use Tor to retrieve information about the numbers they're interested in? To avoid the server from using the time of the requests to correlate them, you could let the clients sleep a random amount of time in between requests, and sometimes request information they already have. Maybe you could even ask volunteers to spam the server with nonsense requests, so that the genuine requests are drowned in this noise.
Why don't the clients simply use Tor to retrieve information about the numbers they're interested in? To avoid the server from using the time of the requests to correlate them, you could let the clients sleep a random amount of time in between requests, and sometimes request information they already have. Maybe you could even ask volunteers to spam the server with nonsense requests, so that the genuine requests are drowned in this noise.
For anyone interested in the design and functioning of Intel's security components there is a book freely available by one to the lead engineers here: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4302-6572-6
Agreed, Platform Embedded Security Technology Revealed by Xiaoyu Ruan should be the first thing anyone reads about it. Much else will become irrelevant or be revealed as ignorant.
Would AMD EPYC's encrypted memory also be of use here?
https://semiaccurate.com/2017/06/22/amds-epyc-major-advance-...
Also, it seems to have its own flaws, just like SGX:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/08/amd_virty_encryptio...
https://semiaccurate.com/2017/06/22/amds-epyc-major-advance-...
Also, it seems to have its own flaws, just like SGX:
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/12/08/amd_virty_encryptio...
I wondered what it was written in, so i clicked on the Github language details bar. Prolog 1.4%! What could it be using Prolog for?
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/ContactDiscoveryService/se...
Fooled again!
https://github.com/WhisperSystems/ContactDiscoveryService/se...
Fooled again!
There's a typo in the link to the Signal-Service (server) source code repository, the actual link is: https://github.com/whispersystems/Signal-Server
This is totally awesome technology, and it sounds like it is well designed and scalable. AWESOME.
In case someone from Open WhisperSystems is listening, please could you implement a UI plugin environment and allow OSS developers to produce "keyboards" for anyone to implement their own preferred features - stickers or classic or neon-80s-retro
Of course that's probably waaay more work than the secure enclave was but its cheap to ask :-)
Ok so that is a bit tongue in cheek but just how much of signal is OSS and how much can the community contribute (it seems that adding gif transparency would be one of those items - but really I don't "get" the requirements.
Ok so that is a bit tongue in cheek but just how much of signal is OSS and how much can the community contribute (it seems that adding gif transparency would be one of those items - but really I don't "get" the requirements.
While they are at it, Signal should improve SMS integration capabilities as well. If Signal is used as default SMS client (Which IMO is a good use case), the search implementation is by far the worst search implementation ever on the application. Searching local SMS DB shouldn’t be security concern, Android’s SearchView should basically do it by itself. I haven’t looked through their code yet, there’s minor possibility that they have ditched some default android frameworks for added security.
> Searching local SMS DB shouldn’t be security concern
Actually, it is, since Signal encrypts your messages and only decrypts them when the app is "open". See http://esl.cs.brown.edu/blog/signal/ and See https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/1232...
Actually, it is, since Signal encrypts your messages and only decrypts them when the app is "open". See http://esl.cs.brown.edu/blog/signal/ and See https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/1232...
Why don't they just use hashed pairs of telefone numbers for discovery? I'm more worried that they have my whole telefone contact list, than that they know with whom I am chatting. They could probably find out the latter by manipulating the client anyway.
Also, don't they neccessarily have a mapping of telefone number -> IP address? They could just show all contacts, and attempt to send if you write to somebody. If they want to only show mutuals, use the hashed pairs to get the IP address (or ID, or status, or whatever they need).
I don't want to be too negative, but this seems to me like an unnecessary complex solution to a problem I don't have. I'd rather have the option to register anonymously, or to use alternative clients and servers.
Also, as a layperson, they could be making all of this up and I would never be able to tell. Somebody could have bought or coerced a couple of security experts that I know and trust, and I would never be able to find out. So, in a sense, a dumber and less secure solution might actually be better...
Also, don't they neccessarily have a mapping of telefone number -> IP address? They could just show all contacts, and attempt to send if you write to somebody. If they want to only show mutuals, use the hashed pairs to get the IP address (or ID, or status, or whatever they need).
I don't want to be too negative, but this seems to me like an unnecessary complex solution to a problem I don't have. I'd rather have the option to register anonymously, or to use alternative clients and servers.
Also, as a layperson, they could be making all of this up and I would never be able to tell. Somebody could have bought or coerced a couple of security experts that I know and trust, and I would never be able to find out. So, in a sense, a dumber and less secure solution might actually be better...
Super interesting.
A related problem I think about frequently is this: how do users know/trust the client software they are running works as they expect?
I wonder if there is some way to use SGX to enhance trust in the client side too.
A related problem I think about frequently is this: how do users know/trust the client software they are running works as they expect?
I wonder if there is some way to use SGX to enhance trust in the client side too.
Cool. It'd be nice if the app used the secure enclave on phones too.
Even if Signal's server can't do it, what's to prevent a client from using a really large list of contacts? (Say, millions of contacts captured via a security leak?)
I think Signal is mainly focusing on hiding user's contacts from Signal rather than hiding who is using Signal from users.
Assuming OWS doesn't rate limit, all that would do is let you tell what phone #s use signal. Which is slightly sensitive info, but radically less so than "who is communicating with whom", which is what the older method could leak.
Good point and I agree it's less sensitive.
But to avoid minimizing it, there is a scenario I've heard where it matters: crazy ex-boyfriend discovers you're using a new messaging service, just because he still has your phone number in his contacts.
Ideally, nobody should know you're using a new messaging service unless you've given explicit consent to share that info with them.
But to avoid minimizing it, there is a scenario I've heard where it matters: crazy ex-boyfriend discovers you're using a new messaging service, just because he still has your phone number in his contacts.
Ideally, nobody should know you're using a new messaging service unless you've given explicit consent to share that info with them.
> The obvious problem with this method is that the hash of a user identifier can almost always be inverted. Regardless of whether the identifier is a phone number, a user name, or an email address, the “keyspace” of all possible identifiers is too small.
What does "inverted" mean here? And why is the keyspace too small? And how do these problems relate to not trusting the server? The problem definition and proposed solution don't seem to match to me, even though what they have solved is cool.
What does "inverted" mean here? And why is the keyspace too small? And how do these problems relate to not trusting the server? The problem definition and proposed solution don't seem to match to me, even though what they have solved is cool.
Imagine you're storing a four-digit PIN (or even 10-digit phone numbers in the U.S.) and you decide to hash them with SHA256 because security.
The key space -- the total number of all possible PINs -- is really small; there are only 10,000 of them. One could simply "pre-compute" the SHA256 hashes of all 10,000 possible PINs and store them in a table.
When you receive a hashed value, it's really simple -- and, more importantly, very fast -- to just look up the hash in the table and get back the original PIN (a.k.a. "inverting" it).
It's kinda the same thing as "rainbow tables", if you recall those.
The key space -- the total number of all possible PINs -- is really small; there are only 10,000 of them. One could simply "pre-compute" the SHA256 hashes of all 10,000 possible PINs and store them in a table.
When you receive a hashed value, it's really simple -- and, more importantly, very fast -- to just look up the hash in the table and get back the original PIN (a.k.a. "inverting" it).
It's kinda the same thing as "rainbow tables", if you recall those.
Take every possible 10-digit U.S. phone number, for example, and perform a SHA-256 hash on each. Put those phone numbers and their hashes in a lookup table. Now, when a hashed phone number comes in from an anonymous user, look it up in that table and you now know the actual phone number.
I'm not an expert, so bear with me. Could this be thwarted by, say, having Signal add a random salt to every registering number and then advertising the hash of (number)+(random salt) as the final contact, invisible to the end user? Or would that involve Signal maintaining too much information on their users? If that's the case, I could see that being a problem.
The problem with salting the hashes is that they then become useless for contact discovery. The only way I can think of to make it work would require sharing the salt with people trying to find you, but then at that point you just share a real user identifier and short-circuit the whole process happening here.
The way I was initially picturing it would involve Signal keeping track of the salt they assigned to the contact number, with that specific salt maybe 'expiring' after a certain number of days (to get rid of salts where someone registered with Signal, didn't like it, and never registered again). After thinking about it some more, I realized that this would probably lead OWS to collecting big lists of registered users and their contact patterns, which goes against their policy of trying to retain as little data as possible.
It doesn't say a word about running inside SGX without the insecure developer mode... or about the use of SGX meaning they're stuck with hardware which has the highly questionable ME layer.
SGX as an additive layer for things you can't make strongly private is interesting... though I wonder if it wouldn't have first made sense to implement a private intersection so that signal users wouldn't have to send numbers that are guaranteed to have no hits.
SGX as an additive layer for things you can't make strongly private is interesting... though I wonder if it wouldn't have first made sense to implement a private intersection so that signal users wouldn't have to send numbers that are guaranteed to have no hits.
You'll get downvoted to oblivion here just for mentioning the ME.
By the way for those unconvinced that this is a serious issue just lookup this one from 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15298833
By the way for those unconvinced that this is a serious issue just lookup this one from 5 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15298833
completely unrelated. I looked at 3 key words. "contact", "discovery" and "signal". and then i added 4th key word "NASA". and thinking NASA Discovery made a private(alien) contact via a signal.! what am I thinking!!!
Started reading this article and it starts off ok and then gets all technical and I got bored.
Because, regardless of how good that solution is technically, I cannot understand what's so difficult about simply making contact discovery optional. At the user's discretion. Like you'd exchange PGP certificates.
Why, and how did user control and consent become so hard?
Because, regardless of how good that solution is technically, I cannot understand what's so difficult about simply making contact discovery optional. At the user's discretion. Like you'd exchange PGP certificates.
Why, and how did user control and consent become so hard?
The security assumptions that SGX is built on are flawed. They assume that no side channel attacks will be mounted to determine the processes that occur in side the chip. You can even build software to do side channel analysis on the physical chip:
7:16:26 Daniel Gruss / Michael Schwarz - Cache Attacks on SGX https://youtu.be/eCE2OzKIab8?t=26193
7:16:26 Daniel Gruss / Michael Schwarz - Cache Attacks on SGX https://youtu.be/eCE2OzKIab8?t=26193
> They assume that no side channel attacks will be mounted to determine the processes that occur in side the chip.
They do? 2/3rds of this blog post are about side channel attacks. The majority of the technical aspects of the article are about memory side channels in SGX and how they overcome those challenges. I haven't looked at the code yet, but it sounds as if they wrote it to be branchless so that attackers can't monitor control flow and so that memory access patterns don't leak anything.
They do? 2/3rds of this blog post are about side channel attacks. The majority of the technical aspects of the article are about memory side channels in SGX and how they overcome those challenges. I haven't looked at the code yet, but it sounds as if they wrote it to be branchless so that attackers can't monitor control flow and so that memory access patterns don't leak anything.
You're correct. My original statement was wrong regarding Intel's assumption. The principle issue is that developers shouldn't assume that processes that occur in SGX are obfuscated in any sense because you can build SGX sidechannel detection within software that runs inside the enclave
The lecture I pointed to shows an example of this attack.
> The security assumptions that SGX is built on are flawed. They assume that no side channel attacks will be mounted to determine the processes that occur in side the chip.
Protecting against side channel attacks and reverse engineering is the responsibility of developers who use SGX, according to Intel's website and user manual:
> Intel designs the Intel Software Guard Extensions to protect against known hardware attacks [...] Intel Software Guard Extensions is not designed to handle side channel attacks or reverse engineering. It is up to the Intel SGX developers to build enclaves that are protected against these types of attack.
Intel's assumptions appear to correctly account for the fact that side channels can occur. They have assessed whether their product is designed to protect against that class of attack, and assigned responsibility for defending against it. What do you think they should do differently?
Protecting against side channel attacks and reverse engineering is the responsibility of developers who use SGX, according to Intel's website and user manual:
> Intel designs the Intel Software Guard Extensions to protect against known hardware attacks [...] Intel Software Guard Extensions is not designed to handle side channel attacks or reverse engineering. It is up to the Intel SGX developers to build enclaves that are protected against these types of attack.
Intel's assumptions appear to correctly account for the fact that side channels can occur. They have assessed whether their product is designed to protect against that class of attack, and assigned responsibility for defending against it. What do you think they should do differently?
You're correct. My original statement was wrong regarding Intel's assumption. The principle issue is that developers shouldn't assume that processes that occur in SGX are obfuscated in any sense because you can build SGX sidechannel detection within software that runs inside the enclave
The lecture I pointed to shows an example of this attack.
The lecture I pointed to shows an example of this attack.
This is much better than the current state but there's still the issue of Intel's Management Engine (ME) that clings on those chips and that has access to pretty much everything...
>clients will be able to efficiently and scalably determine whether the contacts in their address book are Signal users without revealing the contacts in their address book to the Signal service.
This should be the fucking defacto standard!
We really need Privacy-as-a-service and security-as-a-service
This should be the fucking defacto standard!
We really need Privacy-as-a-service and security-as-a-service
> We really need Privacy-as-a-service and security-as-a-service
We can provide food-as-a-service, but we can't provide digestion-as-a-service. Which is to say, we can provide many useful services but privacy and security are things that can't be outsourced, just like you can't hire someone to digest your food for you. They require deep integration and planning, and they're difficult to pull off in the best of cases. Trying to service-ify them is just asking for pain.
We can provide food-as-a-service, but we can't provide digestion-as-a-service. Which is to say, we can provide many useful services but privacy and security are things that can't be outsourced, just like you can't hire someone to digest your food for you. They require deep integration and planning, and they're difficult to pull off in the best of cases. Trying to service-ify them is just asking for pain.
hmm... I like your insight - thank you.
> There are a range of options that don’t work, like using bloom filters, encrypted bloom filters, sharded bloom filters, private information retrieval, or private set intersection.
He just takes as a given that private set intersection doesn't work, and in the original 2014 document[0] writes, 'There are cryptographic protocols for performing privacy-preserving set intersections, but they generally involve transmitting something which represents the full set of both parties, which is a non-starter when one of the sets contains at least 10 million records.' This is just flat-out wrong though: the sets to be intersected are the contacts of two users, not Signal's registered users and the contacts of one user.
[0] https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/
He just takes as a given that private set intersection doesn't work, and in the original 2014 document[0] writes, 'There are cryptographic protocols for performing privacy-preserving set intersections, but they generally involve transmitting something which represents the full set of both parties, which is a non-starter when one of the sets contains at least 10 million records.' This is just flat-out wrong though: the sets to be intersected are the contacts of two users, not Signal's registered users and the contacts of one user.
[0] https://signal.org/blog/contact-discovery/
Who are the two users in this case? How did they discover each other? From the OP:
> "Very few people want to install a communication app, open the compose screen for the first time, and be met by an empty list of who they can communicate with."
Signal needs to bootstrap itself automatically in order to solve this problem. Can you explain how two users doing a private set intersection of their contacts solves this bootstrapping problem?
> "Very few people want to install a communication app, open the compose screen for the first time, and be met by an empty list of who they can communicate with."
Signal needs to bootstrap itself automatically in order to solve this problem. Can you explain how two users doing a private set intersection of their contacts solves this bootstrapping problem?
The two users are two folks who wish to communicate who hold their phones back-to-back and let NFC validate who they each are. Both parties are now able to perform a private set intersection to find people whom they know in common who also use Signal, and are able to then use private set intersection with each of those people to find more.
The idea is that users bootstrap via the social graph of folks they physically know (or, of course, they could fall back to manually entering keys, for experts). Users place their trust in one another, rather than in the server.
The idea is that users bootstrap via the social graph of folks they physically know (or, of course, they could fall back to manually entering keys, for experts). Users place their trust in one another, rather than in the server.
So you want to completely punt on the "open the app to an empty contact list" problem and force people to perform what's effectively a GPG keysigning party...
Call me crazy, but I think that'd be a bad user experience of the sort that held back encrypted messaging for decades.
Call me crazy, but I think that'd be a bad user experience of the sort that held back encrypted messaging for decades.
> So you want to completely punt on the "open the app to an empty contact list" problem and force people to perform what's effectively a GPG keysigning party...
I want to protect people's contact lists.
What's more, Signal's current solution doesn't actually address the problem: the vast majority of people who install Signal will open up the app and see … an empty contact list. Why? Because the vast majority of the human race doesn't use Signal. So what do folks who use Signal have to do? Ask their friends to install it, and register it. Which isn't appreciably different from asking a friend to install Signal, and text/email/NFC one his contact information.
Yes, once a cluster of people have installed it, the contact-sharing functionality becomes useful. So, too, would friend-of-a-friend contact sharing.
> Call me crazy, but I think that'd be a bad user experience of the sort that held back encrypted messaging for decades.
Since that's still the user experience of Signal, and Signal is pretty popular, I don't really think it's a problem.
I use Signal. I like Signal, a lot. I respect Moxie Marlinspike's crypto chops. But I wish he had more respect for privacy, and didn't require us all to trust in his good intentions.
I want to protect people's contact lists.
What's more, Signal's current solution doesn't actually address the problem: the vast majority of people who install Signal will open up the app and see … an empty contact list. Why? Because the vast majority of the human race doesn't use Signal. So what do folks who use Signal have to do? Ask their friends to install it, and register it. Which isn't appreciably different from asking a friend to install Signal, and text/email/NFC one his contact information.
Yes, once a cluster of people have installed it, the contact-sharing functionality becomes useful. So, too, would friend-of-a-friend contact sharing.
> Call me crazy, but I think that'd be a bad user experience of the sort that held back encrypted messaging for decades.
Since that's still the user experience of Signal, and Signal is pretty popular, I don't really think it's a problem.
I use Signal. I like Signal, a lot. I respect Moxie Marlinspike's crypto chops. But I wish he had more respect for privacy, and didn't require us all to trust in his good intentions.
They could at least allow it. Signal is the odd one out among secure messenger apps for having no way of adding a contact in a face to face setting without uploading all your contacts to their servers.
Signal allows you to send messages to numbers which are not in your contacts, which by definition implies it can be done without uploading your contacts to your servers.
In person you can also exchange "safety numbers" via QR code which provides key verification.
In person you can also exchange "safety numbers" via QR code which provides key verification.
The whole point is finding out which of your contacts are already on Signal. What benefit do you get out of performing set intersection on the contacts lists of 2 users? That sort of thing is done to find your "mutual friends", but I don't see why a messaging service like Signal cares about mutual friends.
> I don't see why a messaging service like Signal cares about mutual friends.
Signal doesn't care; users care about mutual friends.
Here's an example:
- Alice installs Signal². She has many contacts, and doesn't know which contacts also use Signal². Notably, she doesn't want to give the Signal² servers all of her contacts.
- Alice asks Bob to install Signal². He does, and they trade key information (e.g. via SMS, email, NFC — whatever) and their phones use private set intersection to discover that they have Charlie, Diana & Ed in common. None of those guys has Signal² installed yet, so far as Alice or Bob know.
- Alice asks Charlie to install Signal². He does, they trade key information, and they see that they have Bob, Frank & Gene in common. Charlie gets (what Alice says is) Bob's public key, without contacting Bob directly.
- Charlie's phone contacts Bob's phone, and discovers that they have Alice in common; Charlie's phone validates that Bob's claim of Alice's key matches what he verified himself.
- Bob asks Diana to install Signal². She already has it, so all they need to do is exchange keys and discover mutual contacts. They both know Alice & Ed — and Diana is able to give Bob Ed's public key (it turns out that, unbeknownst to Alice or Bob, he's been using Signal² for months). Bob's phone can then share Ed's public key with Alice in another round of set intersection.
- Diana's phone can also share Ed's public key with Alice, now that she knows Alice's contact information. Alice's phone now has two different people attesting to Ed's public key; if they agree, that's good and if they disagree then her phone can give her a warning. She can contact Ed out-of-band if she chooses. This is an improvement on the current Signal protocol, since Alice has a chance to detect a malicious attestation without having to manually compare keys with Ed.
Note the user experience: as each user starts using Signal², his social network is used to share the contact information of his circles of friends. Users are incented to be truthful, since lying will be easily detected. The Signal² servers never see users' contacts; they don't even need to know users' real-world identities.
Just as in current Signal, each Signal² user is introduced to the program by a friend. Just as in the current Signal, users discover contacts who use Signal². Now, it's not identical: users won't see contacts who use Signal but have no mutual friends in common. This is indeed a cost — but it comes with the benefit of not needing to trust OWS.
Signal doesn't care; users care about mutual friends.
Here's an example:
- Alice installs Signal². She has many contacts, and doesn't know which contacts also use Signal². Notably, she doesn't want to give the Signal² servers all of her contacts.
- Alice asks Bob to install Signal². He does, and they trade key information (e.g. via SMS, email, NFC — whatever) and their phones use private set intersection to discover that they have Charlie, Diana & Ed in common. None of those guys has Signal² installed yet, so far as Alice or Bob know.
- Alice asks Charlie to install Signal². He does, they trade key information, and they see that they have Bob, Frank & Gene in common. Charlie gets (what Alice says is) Bob's public key, without contacting Bob directly.
- Charlie's phone contacts Bob's phone, and discovers that they have Alice in common; Charlie's phone validates that Bob's claim of Alice's key matches what he verified himself.
- Bob asks Diana to install Signal². She already has it, so all they need to do is exchange keys and discover mutual contacts. They both know Alice & Ed — and Diana is able to give Bob Ed's public key (it turns out that, unbeknownst to Alice or Bob, he's been using Signal² for months). Bob's phone can then share Ed's public key with Alice in another round of set intersection.
- Diana's phone can also share Ed's public key with Alice, now that she knows Alice's contact information. Alice's phone now has two different people attesting to Ed's public key; if they agree, that's good and if they disagree then her phone can give her a warning. She can contact Ed out-of-band if she chooses. This is an improvement on the current Signal protocol, since Alice has a chance to detect a malicious attestation without having to manually compare keys with Ed.
Note the user experience: as each user starts using Signal², his social network is used to share the contact information of his circles of friends. Users are incented to be truthful, since lying will be easily detected. The Signal² servers never see users' contacts; they don't even need to know users' real-world identities.
Just as in current Signal, each Signal² user is introduced to the program by a friend. Just as in the current Signal, users discover contacts who use Signal². Now, it's not identical: users won't see contacts who use Signal but have no mutual friends in common. This is indeed a cost — but it comes with the benefit of not needing to trust OWS.
Users also won't see contacts who use Signal and do have mutual friends in common, but who simply haven't used Signal to talk to those mutual friends.
Your solution is certainly better than nothing, but it relies on people having actually used Signal to talk to each other in the past. It also appears to involve a lot of P2P coordination. And while it may not share contacts with the Signal servers, it does leak your address book to all of your friends, with potentially serious consequences ("hey, why does Alice have my therapist in her address book?", "Bob told me he erased Carol from his life! Why does he have Carol's key?", etc).
Your solution is certainly better than nothing, but it relies on people having actually used Signal to talk to each other in the past. It also appears to involve a lot of P2P coordination. And while it may not share contacts with the Signal servers, it does leak your address book to all of your friends, with potentially serious consequences ("hey, why does Alice have my therapist in her address book?", "Bob told me he erased Carol from his life! Why does he have Carol's key?", etc).
> Your solution is certainly better than nothing, but it relies on people having actually used Signal to talk to each other in the past.
Well, it is trying to incentivise Signal² usage:-)
> It also appears to involve a lot of P2P coordination.
Not necessarily a huge amount, I think — folks could SMS/email stuff as well as trade contacts face to face, depending on their risk preferences.
> it does leak your address book to all of your friends
Only where there are overlaps: since it's private set intersection, Alice & Bob only see their mutual acquaintances, not other folks. But yes, the mutual-thereapist issue exists. Presumably an expert mode might enable folks to whitelist/blacklist particular contacts when they're added.
Certainly, there are ways in which this approach is worse & more complex than the current Signal approach, but it is better in another way: it preserves privacy from Signal (and its hosting provider, and Intel, and any government which can coërce Signal, its hosting provider and/or Intel into subverting security).
Well, it is trying to incentivise Signal² usage:-)
> It also appears to involve a lot of P2P coordination.
Not necessarily a huge amount, I think — folks could SMS/email stuff as well as trade contacts face to face, depending on their risk preferences.
> it does leak your address book to all of your friends
Only where there are overlaps: since it's private set intersection, Alice & Bob only see their mutual acquaintances, not other folks. But yes, the mutual-thereapist issue exists. Presumably an expert mode might enable folks to whitelist/blacklist particular contacts when they're added.
Certainly, there are ways in which this approach is worse & more complex than the current Signal approach, but it is better in another way: it preserves privacy from Signal (and its hosting provider, and Intel, and any government which can coërce Signal, its hosting provider and/or Intel into subverting security).
I mean if you already know who's on Signal then why do you even need to do PSI with them?
Considering that Signal is advertised (with Snowden as face) for people who need privacy from governments (including the US government), I am doubtful if this is useful for the advertised purpose. (For normal users this is already overkill, of course).
Even if we assume the NSA has no backdoors in the secure enclave, there have been countless demonstrations against secure enclaves in today’s real-world processors on conferences.
Additionally, the same problem applies here that has been used before to break Google’s SafetyNet solution (which does the same, but the opposite way around, to ensure the client is running, and can’t prevent tracking): You can simply have two systems, and for attestation you question the true device, but for actual code execution you run it on an emulated one, where you can extract all data. Alternatively, you can still emulate this system completely and circumvent it via that path, too.
The only way to truly verify SGX is by having a signature of the processor manufacturer – but in that case, you still don’t get protection from the NSA, or the processor manufacturer.
Even if we assume the NSA has no backdoors in the secure enclave, there have been countless demonstrations against secure enclaves in today’s real-world processors on conferences.
Additionally, the same problem applies here that has been used before to break Google’s SafetyNet solution (which does the same, but the opposite way around, to ensure the client is running, and can’t prevent tracking): You can simply have two systems, and for attestation you question the true device, but for actual code execution you run it on an emulated one, where you can extract all data. Alternatively, you can still emulate this system completely and circumvent it via that path, too.
The only way to truly verify SGX is by having a signature of the processor manufacturer – but in that case, you still don’t get protection from the NSA, or the processor manufacturer.
This attitude is a big reason why doing constructive work in security is hard.
Yes, there are huge challenges and lots of different attack vectors. No, that doesn't invalidate the progress that's made when someone invests a lot of time and effort to solve 80% of an extremely difficult problem.
Sometimes it feels like you could solve world hunger and world peace, but unless you also gave everyone a puppy, half of the security community would still complain.
(And then there's always someone who wanted a kitten instead of a puppy...)
Yes, there are huge challenges and lots of different attack vectors. No, that doesn't invalidate the progress that's made when someone invests a lot of time and effort to solve 80% of an extremely difficult problem.
Sometimes it feels like you could solve world hunger and world peace, but unless you also gave everyone a puppy, half of the security community would still complain.
(And then there's always someone who wanted a kitten instead of a puppy...)
Well, it is a major step – but Moxie always sells his solutions, even if they’re just a puppy, as solutions for world hunger.
As I mentioned, advertising with Snowden leads to a promise that Signal can not fulfill. Not even with this.
But, you know, there is already a solution for all the issues here: Don’t use phone numbers, use usernames! As it turns out, that is far more private and secure.
As I mentioned, advertising with Snowden leads to a promise that Signal can not fulfill. Not even with this.
But, you know, there is already a solution for all the issues here: Don’t use phone numbers, use usernames! As it turns out, that is far more private and secure.
First, you're not wrong about Signal being insufficient against nation state adversaries. The Grugq has a nice talk about opsec that I can't seem to find atm. He sums up the issues with Signal nicely in a Medium article. [1]
That said, this particular development is a lot more than a puppy. It's at least a full grown, happy, friendly Golden Retriever who's already house trained and knows how to fetch your slippers.
They've removed one of the biggest remaining weaknesses of their system, where they still required the users to "just trust" them. That's pretty cool, especially for the vast majority of us whose primary adversaries are smaller or profit-driven.
[1] https://medium.com/@thegrugq/signal-intelligence-free-for-al...
That said, this particular development is a lot more than a puppy. It's at least a full grown, happy, friendly Golden Retriever who's already house trained and knows how to fetch your slippers.
They've removed one of the biggest remaining weaknesses of their system, where they still required the users to "just trust" them. That's pretty cool, especially for the vast majority of us whose primary adversaries are smaller or profit-driven.
[1] https://medium.com/@thegrugq/signal-intelligence-free-for-al...
Are you by any chance referring to this [0] talk?
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU
> Don’t use phone numbers, use usernames! As it turns out, that is far more private and secure.
It is. But it's not convenient. Everyone has contact list with numbers and people want to talk to their friends immediately not call them for their ID for service X.
It is. But it's not convenient. Everyone has contact list with numbers and people want to talk to their friends immediately not call them for their ID for service X.
Everyone?
I've got basically no phone numbers of many of my friends, or they've switched them so often that the ones I have are long wrong. Half the numbers in my contacts list don't exist anymore.
I certainly prefer usernames.
I've got basically no phone numbers of many of my friends, or they've switched them so often that the ones I have are long wrong. Half the numbers in my contacts list don't exist anymore.
I certainly prefer usernames.
Clearly you're not the target market for Signal but there are many encrypted messangers out there for you.
I'm not so sure about that. Matrix is the closest thing, and that has a code quality that makes me want to puke.
EDIT: Before I get complaints from the Matrix devs again that I’m bad-mouthing their app: ObjectOutputStream is NOT a suitable implementation for a "database": https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk/blob/736643...
EDIT: Before I get complaints from the Matrix devs again that I’m bad-mouthing their app: ObjectOutputStream is NOT a suitable implementation for a "database": https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-android-sdk/blob/736643...
Any project made up of hundreds of repos has bad areas which you can cherrypick if you want to bad-mouth, especially whilst still it's very actively in dev. For instance, conversely on iOS we have four different local store API implementations[1] ranging from in-memory, flatfile (via NSKeyedArchiver), CoreData and Realm. The equivalent work just hasn't yet happened on Android; PRs welcome.
Once again, why not invest your time in doing something more productive than spreading FUD about Matrix?
[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/tree/master/Mat... and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/tree/master/Mat...
Once again, why not invest your time in doing something more productive than spreading FUD about Matrix?
[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/tree/master/Mat... and https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-ios-sdk/tree/master/Mat...
> Once again, why not invest your time in doing something more productive than spreading FUD about Matrix?
Because I’m already investing my time in improving IRC, and there’s little time left after that.
> spreading FUD about Matrix?
Every criticism of mine you’ve admitted to be true, yet call it FUD still. Even this one you admit that there is significant amounts of bad code in Matrix, just argue that other projects have as much. That’s no excuse.
> The equivalent work just hasn't yet happened on Android; PRs welcome.
So why did this happen in the first place? This isn’t even just bad code – someone spent significant amounts of work and time (far more than would’ve been spent for using existing solutions such as Realm) on this. And there’s many pieces of the Matrix code just like that.
Because I’m already investing my time in improving IRC, and there’s little time left after that.
> spreading FUD about Matrix?
Every criticism of mine you’ve admitted to be true, yet call it FUD still. Even this one you admit that there is significant amounts of bad code in Matrix, just argue that other projects have as much. That’s no excuse.
> The equivalent work just hasn't yet happened on Android; PRs welcome.
So why did this happen in the first place? This isn’t even just bad code – someone spent significant amounts of work and time (far more than would’ve been spent for using existing solutions such as Realm) on this. And there’s many pieces of the Matrix code just like that.
The FUD is saying "Matrix's code quality makes me want to puke" and then cherrypicking a non-representative example. Android may still use flatfiles as the work needed to switch simply hasn't happened yet (it's a one person team handling the whole platform), but both iOS & JS SDKs show the opposite picture (iOS with 4 stores; JS SDK supporting 3 different stores; in-memory, localStorage and indexeddb).
So, please back off. We wish IRCv3 and your projects the best; please stop spewing negativity about us.
So, please back off. We wish IRCv3 and your projects the best; please stop spewing negativity about us.
That was a representative sample of the code quality on the Android side.
The problem isn't in flat files, it's in "serializing" to the flat files by dumping the objects directly from memory. Specifically, Java's native serializer is used, which serializes types and constructors in a non+portable way. There are fucktons of people that get this wrong, every second RCE in JavaEE was due to this. It's long deprecated. You use it as only storage backend.
Files written that way can't be reliably read on different android versions, or different devices.
Reading such files back in basically allows anyone with write access to the files to execute whatever they want in your process, because it also serializes constructors.
The problem isn't flat files, but that whoever wrote that code has never had any experience with security critical code.
I can easily provide hundreds more examples of this. Race conditions that lead to private messages being sent unencrypted. Bugs that cause full crashes due to code errors. Horrible messaging performance with tons of low hanging fruit.
All this would be fine were this a random flashlight app.
But if an app with a focus on secure messaging fucks up the secure part and the messaging part, then it's definitely not something I'd want to use. I've got apps of my own that I've worked on daily for 3 years that have similar code quality — but guess what, I haven't released them, because of this code quality.
With secure messaging, you can't release first and iterate later, you actually need to build a secure solution from the first version on.
The fact that you apply Silicon Valley mentality to secure messaging makes it already problematic. If your company needs to iterate or pivot, you can. But once your data's been sent unencrypted, it's gone.
And the fact that you also don't even notice the problem with this code even when I'm pointing you directly at it makes it even worse, because it makes your project even less trustworthy.
The problem isn't in flat files, it's in "serializing" to the flat files by dumping the objects directly from memory. Specifically, Java's native serializer is used, which serializes types and constructors in a non+portable way. There are fucktons of people that get this wrong, every second RCE in JavaEE was due to this. It's long deprecated. You use it as only storage backend.
Files written that way can't be reliably read on different android versions, or different devices.
Reading such files back in basically allows anyone with write access to the files to execute whatever they want in your process, because it also serializes constructors.
The problem isn't flat files, but that whoever wrote that code has never had any experience with security critical code.
I can easily provide hundreds more examples of this. Race conditions that lead to private messages being sent unencrypted. Bugs that cause full crashes due to code errors. Horrible messaging performance with tons of low hanging fruit.
All this would be fine were this a random flashlight app.
But if an app with a focus on secure messaging fucks up the secure part and the messaging part, then it's definitely not something I'd want to use. I've got apps of my own that I've worked on daily for 3 years that have similar code quality — but guess what, I haven't released them, because of this code quality.
With secure messaging, you can't release first and iterate later, you actually need to build a secure solution from the first version on.
The fact that you apply Silicon Valley mentality to secure messaging makes it already problematic. If your company needs to iterate or pivot, you can. But once your data's been sent unencrypted, it's gone.
And the fact that you also don't even notice the problem with this code even when I'm pointing you directly at it makes it even worse, because it makes your project even less trustworthy.
We know the issues around ObjectStreams and rehydrating constructors; mad gadget style vulns etc. But this is a local cache of trusted data which can only ever be touched by the app, and if an attacker is starting to mess around with your app's file storage you are already in a pretty bad situation. And, as I said, this is a placeholder for a proper DB.
In terms of whether "release and iterate" is unacceptable for secure messaging: we make it abundantly clear that the privacy protecting features are still in development and are beta quality and shouldn't be used for anything where privacy is critical. Meanwhile the idea that secure messaging products shouldn't be publicly beta'd prior to a formal GA (especially for stuff as complex as decentralised e2e crypto) feels weird at best.
If you've found fatal crashes or races in the E2E UX, please do the responsible thing and chuck an email to [email protected] rather than bragging about non-specifics here. Finally: Matrix's projects span a little bit more than just the Android SDK, which is admittedly mid-development still. So yes, there's loads of low-hanging optimisation work to be done and some areas of crappy code, but that's not remotely the whole picture.
In terms of whether "release and iterate" is unacceptable for secure messaging: we make it abundantly clear that the privacy protecting features are still in development and are beta quality and shouldn't be used for anything where privacy is critical. Meanwhile the idea that secure messaging products shouldn't be publicly beta'd prior to a formal GA (especially for stuff as complex as decentralised e2e crypto) feels weird at best.
If you've found fatal crashes or races in the E2E UX, please do the responsible thing and chuck an email to [email protected] rather than bragging about non-specifics here. Finally: Matrix's projects span a little bit more than just the Android SDK, which is admittedly mid-development still. So yes, there's loads of low-hanging optimisation work to be done and some areas of crappy code, but that's not remotely the whole picture.
What about XMPP with OMEMO? I know it's not the latest hype but has decentralized usernames.
In a previous comment on that Moxie interview story posted here, I complained that OWS doesn't do a great job of building a community or making it excited about its product.
Something I forgot to add then: why doesn't Signal have a public roadmap? Almost all open source projects that I've seen have one. Why? Because they are typically community-driven and developed projects and because they rely on the community to buy into the project's future, and give a hand developing it or funding it.
But we don't see that with Signal. Why does the roadmap have to be secret? I'm not even talking about deadlines and schedules. Just decide on a bunch of features and present them on the site. You may get more volunteers willing to help if they see an interesting new feature popping up on the horizon.
Also, please do something about the call routing speed. It takes too long for a call to connect. If it's a funding issue, then say so. In fact, it wouldn't hurt to have "crowdfunding campaigns" for the various features on the roadmap. Show progress lines and whatnot, and then start developing that feature when it's fully funded, etc
The whole project needs to become more open towards the community and less "we'll just be here in our basement for the next 2 years developing an awesome secret feature."
Something I forgot to add then: why doesn't Signal have a public roadmap? Almost all open source projects that I've seen have one. Why? Because they are typically community-driven and developed projects and because they rely on the community to buy into the project's future, and give a hand developing it or funding it.
But we don't see that with Signal. Why does the roadmap have to be secret? I'm not even talking about deadlines and schedules. Just decide on a bunch of features and present them on the site. You may get more volunteers willing to help if they see an interesting new feature popping up on the horizon.
Also, please do something about the call routing speed. It takes too long for a call to connect. If it's a funding issue, then say so. In fact, it wouldn't hurt to have "crowdfunding campaigns" for the various features on the roadmap. Show progress lines and whatnot, and then start developing that feature when it's fully funded, etc
The whole project needs to become more open towards the community and less "we'll just be here in our basement for the next 2 years developing an awesome secret feature."
previous comment of parent - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15282210
Cue the inevitable HN complaints that it's not perfect security, that you still have to trust your CPU manufacturer, that the app permissions are too invasive, that it uses phone numbers as identifiers, and that it runs on Google play services.
Pull your head out of the trees and look at the forest: humanity desperately needs privacy herd immunity, and you are taking the part of digital anti-vaxxer.
Signal is one of the best options available for privacy: thoughtfully architected by a leader in the field, reliable, with a good UI and reasonable adoption, and genuinely open source. People NEED an alternative to Facebook messenger, Facebook WhatsApp, closed source Viber and Telegram, and carrier SMS. By refusing to recommend this extremely good, strong contender, you are actively hurting the causes of privacy and open source. Stop being a digital anti-vaxxer.
If you have complaints, submit a PR or make a compatible fork. But stop discouraging people from protecting themselves.
Or alternatively: if you're going to be a digital anti-vaxxer, hit up Facebook, Google, or the NSA to see if they'll send you a paycheck for it. Because doing their jobs for free is just dumb.