This seems a bit too nitpicky tbh.
The author is correct, Signal is not “perfect”, because the weakest link is always the endpoint device and the end user. Which is kind of the whole point of this article; The issue is not that Signal was used, as it’s reasonably secure, it’s that the people using it are not secure at all.
Right, those shouldn’t be conflated (the protocols vs the phone/persons security properties).I think anyone actively targeted by a major govt power is probably fucked though. Pegasus has taught us that, so while signal is probably a pretty secure protocol, phones definitely have a lot of vulnerabilities.
OK, my time to pick nits: There is a clear and present threat. China, Russia and certainly the US as well have teams of cryptographers looking at software such as Signal and analysing every update and change made in order to spot potential openings. The threat towards Signal however is comparatively small because there are tens if not hundreds of times as many people checking the code as well and reporting back to Signal because of its Open-source nature.
As far as I’m aware the encryption can’t really be broken given the current amount of compute. Is anyone aware of what potential vulnerabilities there could be to the Signal protocol outside of brute forcing? How hard is it to crack a private public key exchange?
One of the biggest issues is they can be recorded and potentially decrypted in the future once quantum computing attacks become feasible. At the moment, the cryptography in Signal (or similar) has no known vulnerabilities that would make it vulnerable to practical attacks given reasonable assumptions about the technology that exists in the world at the moment.
And this is very much not limited just to signal. No matter what software, protocol or any other way you use to communicate, both you and the receiving entity/entities are the weakest link by a long shot. I don’t expect even my closest friends to hold our everyday conversations secret if for whatever reason their wellbeing was threated in any way. And even if I did there’s always other options, like targeted social engineering, to get trough pretty much any reasonable safety concerns on digital communication.
Of course in everyday life if our chat histories were publicly available it would not be too big of an issue, but it’s still something worth keeping on mind when interacting over any digital or any other written medium.
Given the rest of their behavior I’m seeing that chat member leaning across the lunch table towards Putin’s secretary, holding out his phone: “hey look, we’re just about to bomb Yemen!”
But it isn’t that hard to create a signal account with the name of someone high in the US ranks and send a request to these people. They are too dumb to actually validate the key of the person.
Encryption can’t handle when the encrypt with a foe’s key and send that for the message.
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The most uncrackable encryption can be defeated by Steven Witkoff sitting on Putin’s lap while reading the messages.
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I think it’s disingenuous to try to suggest that communists have anything to do with it. It’s purely an oligarchical shithole.
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This seems a bit too nitpicky tbh.
The author is correct, Signal is not “perfect”, because the weakest link is always the endpoint device and the end user. Which is kind of the whole point of this article; The issue is not that Signal was used, as it’s reasonably secure, it’s that the people using it are not secure at all.
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Right, those shouldn’t be conflated (the protocols vs the phone/persons security properties).I think anyone actively targeted by a major govt power is probably fucked though. Pegasus has taught us that, so while signal is probably a pretty secure protocol, phones definitely have a lot of vulnerabilities.
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OK, my time to pick nits: There is a clear and present threat. China, Russia and certainly the US as well have teams of cryptographers looking at software such as Signal and analysing every update and change made in order to spot potential openings. The threat towards Signal however is comparatively small because there are tens if not hundreds of times as many people checking the code as well and reporting back to Signal because of its Open-source nature.
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As far as I’m aware the encryption can’t really be broken given the current amount of compute. Is anyone aware of what potential vulnerabilities there could be to the Signal protocol outside of brute forcing? How hard is it to crack a private public key exchange?
One of the biggest issues is they can be recorded and potentially decrypted in the future once quantum computing attacks become feasible. At the moment, the cryptography in Signal (or similar) has no known vulnerabilities that would make it vulnerable to practical attacks given reasonable assumptions about the technology that exists in the world at the moment.
And this is very much not limited just to signal. No matter what software, protocol or any other way you use to communicate, both you and the receiving entity/entities are the weakest link by a long shot. I don’t expect even my closest friends to hold our everyday conversations secret if for whatever reason their wellbeing was threated in any way. And even if I did there’s always other options, like targeted social engineering, to get trough pretty much any reasonable safety concerns on digital communication.
Of course in everyday life if our chat histories were publicly available it would not be too big of an issue, but it’s still something worth keeping on mind when interacting over any digital or any other written medium.
Given the rest of their behavior I’m seeing that chat member leaning across the lunch table towards Putin’s secretary, holding out his phone: “hey look, we’re just about to bomb Yemen!”
But it isn’t that hard to create a signal account with the name of someone high in the US ranks and send a request to these people. They are too dumb to actually validate the key of the person.
Encryption can’t handle when the encrypt with a foe’s key and send that for the message.