Hundreds of millions use Messenger from a web browser.
No secure way to verify code or store keys without
routing through mobile.
I wouldn't use the web version if they had not disabled Jabber access... and then I could use OTR.
This trend makes me very sad... IM networks are getting more centralized as ever. I don't feel thankful for this kind of development. End-to-end encryption should not be a feature of the service provider, but the client. The way this works with Whatsapp/FB/Google just requires us to believe that their proprietary client is actually doing what it promises. And for me that I don't have a smartphone they just don't even promise anything.
I just wish I could use XMPP or Matrix with my non-nerdy friends. There was this time Google seemed to not be evil with GTalk/XMPP, but then... The business cynicism that dominates this industry, allowing people to claim that they "connect people" at the same time that they put everyone in digital prisons, makes me really want to leave computing and go live in a cave.
Enabling interoperable chat to non-nerdy friends is basically Matrix's raison d'être. We're not there yet (see https://matrix.org/blog/2016/07/04/the-matrix-summer-special... for the current status), but if we don't provide it we will have failed in the whole mission to defragment these silos, letting users choose which service to trust without losing interoperability.
The good news is that the Olm end-to-end cryptographic ratchet that Matrix is in the process of deploying (https://matrix.org/git/olm) is built using the same algorithms as Signal Protocol's ratchet (although it's an independent implementation) - so we're hopeful that at least technically the window is open in future for using Matrix to defragment all the services who have adopted Signal Protocol (WhatsApp, Google Allo, FB Messenger, Signal itself etc) without compromising the E2E privacy. Right now this is total sci-fi, and won't likely happen (whilst preserving E2E crypto) without cooperation from FB, Google etc.
However, we hope to get Matrix to the point where they see that the longer term benefits of participating in a healthy open ecosystem outweigh the short term benefits of trying to lock users into a silo - just as email eventually interoperated over the early internet. That's a while off, but this is still the goal.
The best way to make sure this happens is to play with Matrix in its current form, and help us write bridges (e.g. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-bridge/blob/...) to interface as many silos as possible into Matrix. The more bridges, the more useful Matrix is, and the higher the chance of building an ecosystem which eventually Google, FB and friends will find attractive.
Thanks a lot for your work on Matrix. It is definitely one of the projects (like Syncthing, IPFS or GNU Social) that gives me enough hope to not run to the caves so early :)
On the serverside (which may be "local" depending on where your server is running), the history for the rooms you participate in is stored as a matter of course. Matrix operates by replicating that history between the servers participating in the conversation. If that history is e2e encrypted, any device with the necessary cryptographic ratchet state can decrypt it. (Note that rooms may be configured to change ratchet frequently to deliberately stop history being decrypted multiple times, providing a form of PFS).
On the client side, it depends on the client you're using. Many native Matrix clients and many bridged clients give the option to store local history (whether it was originally encypted or not). Smarter clients will store it encrypted at rest by whatever mechanisms the OS and hardware provides.
I honestly find this centralization as worrying as mass surveillance itself. I'm as afraid of the Facebooks of this world as I am of any government, and I don't want all my communication locked in with one company.
This is why I will not use or recommend Signal. Moxie's anti-federation stance is unacceptable to me. It's replacing one problem with another.
I don't like this either. My long time wishes have been to have federated systems for instant messaging and for social networks. Neither seem to be getting any traction with the big and rich corporations actively working against any kind of interoperability. All the pro-privacy solutions depend on getting all your contacts into another walled garden, albeit a nicer one than the likes of Facebook and Google.
Beyond federation, I would also like the solutions to have good features and usability. Right now I'm bouncing between a few walled systems:
1. Telegram - really fast development pace, poor crypto, E2E encryption is only for chosen chats and single device.
2. Signal - slow to deliver messages, not multi-device and has usability bugs and issues. I update it somewhat regularly and try using it, but still go back to Telegram because basic expectations aren't met.
3. Wire - I discovered this recently and like the feature set (it's a lot richer than Signal). It claims to use the Signal protocol and has support for voice and video too. All chats are E2E encrypted (unlike Telegram where non-secret chats are by default not encrypted on the device or on Telegram's servers), and it has multi-device support with message sync (only from the time the device is joined to the account). Clients are available for different mobile and desktop platforms. But this one also has poor usability in getting started with it and has simple things missing - like no message delivered or message read indicators (the latter could at least be present as a user selectable option for privacy). I don't know how slow this is to deliver messages, but it's definitely not as fast as Telegram is. Not knowing if a message reached or not is unacceptable in this era.
I'm still waiting for some more strong solutions to appear in this space. Seeing that more platforms are adopting the Signal protocol, it would be great to have some standardization in user identification and federation. I actually do not want any of these solutions to be completely free and wish they would provide some way to help them monetarily (at least for the people who do want to help them). I feel repelled by the "free forever" and "we'll sell premium things later, like stickers" parts. That also brings suspicions about the motives of the company/developers and the future viability of the application or platform. At least allow people to donate to you so that you feel some kind of return obligation for all users!
Makes me wonder... what's the current total number of active XMPP users (for chat, I mean, not for Android notifications)? Is it still bigger than the number of Signal uses?
I have a feeling that federation is one of those Good Things that reduce the potential user base until it isn't good any more.
You can't run your own signal server. All accounts use phone numbers in the same namespace as ID, and all messages go from the phone to opensystems.org, further on to google, and from google to the destination phone (with lots of encryption being added and removed at various points). This has advantages (it's difficult for the Man distinguish a received signal message from other android notifications) but also disadvantage (moxie can do traffic analysis and you can't do anything about it).
You can totally run your own server for yourself and your friends: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/TextSecure-Server (you'll have to change the server's URL in the client's source as well and compile it yourself, but that's really easy)
What you won't be able to do is federate with the official servers.
Oh, and there's also a WebSocket transport (used by the Desktop client) that doesn't involve Google. That just doesn't provide a pleasant experience on mobile.
Yeah, so instead of being in Whisper Systems' walled garden, I can set up my own and ask people to install Rvense's Magical Messenger App. Sit there in my treehouse with a bucket on my head and a NO DUMMIES sign or something.
You can sideload apps without a developer subscription. It's annoying but works. But you have an unsolved update problem on both Android and iOS. You really shouldn't do this if you're not 100% sure of the implications.
> you'll have to change the server's URL in the client's source as well and compile it yourself, but that's really easy
I'm sorry, but is this a joke? "To not use a centralized server that you can neither audit nor trust, you have to recompile the client, but that's easy?"
This smacks of "oh, PGP for email is fiiiiiine." To say nothing of the silliness of the inability to federate.
No, it's not a joke and you shouldn't treat it as such. Non-technical people really shouldn't be whining that their "free service" doesn't cater to a click-and-run crowd. The source is available to the public to create their own, and changing a URL in the code is a single regex command away.
Don't casually disregard him because you or others can't understand basics of doing what it takes to alter and run a service in your own private space.
I don't casually disregard him. I thoughtfully and with consideration disregard him, and you as well. The idea that there is a priestly-class of technical people and "non-technical people shouldn't whine" is silly. This is not for technical people. This is for non-technical people. I've been doing this stuff for twenty years. But me being able to do it doesn't do a damned thing to help the people who actually need help.
I don't need Signal to communicate with knowledgeable people. We need something to communicate with everyone else.
And yet the same argument has been made time and time again against SMTP. Let's stand back for a second and understand why SMTP has stood the test of time. Yes it has flaws that allow the "first contact" problem (ie spam). But the people working on SMTP at least understand the weaknesses and advantages of that.
The moment you open the door for federation, the protocol is written in stone forever. All it takes is one server in the federation network with a substantial user base that chooses not to update. (See SMTP).
OWS decided that relinquishing the ability to force updates (i.e. away from a broken cryptosystem) would sacrifice too much in the way of security to be consistent with the project's goals.
I understand that. I don't think it's a malicious decision. I think it's a wrong one. I'm not criticizing Whisper Systems, I'm criticizing the tech-priesty stuff out of the post I replied to.
I didn't say this was a good way for normal users. Normal users don't care about federation and don't want to run their own server. But for people on HN it should be easy, and if you and your hacker friends don't trust moxie you can do it. I never said you should, just that's it's possible and not hard.
Compiling the client is much less daunting than running your own server, so "easy" seems like a fair description in this context. I don't think there's a large intersection between "People who can't easily compile the client" and "People who would run or audit a secure messaging server."
My response is that we just have to try harder. He's focusing only on encryption and ignoring the massive social problem of one company or a few companies having a monopoly on digital communication. Just like whether or not I'm spied on is irrelevant to whether or not I have the right to private (encrypted) communications, it doesn't matter who has monopoly or what they use it for. We should not be building infrastructure that encourages monopolies, and unfederated services are by definition monopolies.
Did you just coin that? It appropriately captures what is going on, but without having the positive connotation that comes from a 'walled garden'. I love the phrase.
As an example outside of messaging, I have a fitbit and 'digital prison' so aptly describes what happens with my personal health data. I can't get my heart rate data out of their prison, because the fitbit warden doesn't see it fit to grant me the privilege to access my raw data.
"Walled garden" is more appropriate than "digital prison". No one is being sentenced involuntarily to these enclosures, they are voluntarily choosing to accept them because of what is inside them.
"Cult compound" is probably how I would describe it. Sure, you can leave, but there is immense social pressure to continue in what has become the norm, despite there clearly being something not okay with what is going on. And good luck convincing others to leave when you do.
Never heard "cult compound" in this context so far and by thinking about it I really think it better fits then "walled garden". "Walled garden" sounds like you go there because of its beauty or for getting the best crops while in reality you go there because it's the most crowded place.
> "Walled garden" sounds like you go there because of its beauty or for getting the best crops
Which is exactly why people go to them.
> while in reality you go there because it's the most crowded place.
Directly true of social networks (where the "crop" is "people you can interact with through the network"), perhaps less directly true of some other walled gardens (though network effects are a thing.)
But also directly opposite of what you'd expect from a "cult compound", which people go more to escape what is most popular, than to experience what is most popular.
> "But also directly opposite of what you'd expect from a "cult compound", which people go more to escape what is most popular, than to experience what is most popular."
Agreed, I thought of this point while sending my comment but wasn't sure how to put that in words. So maybe it's the "most crowded garden party".
It's also one hell of a loaded term with things like Heavens Gate and Jim Jones having existed. To my knowledge, Facebook has yet to cause a mass suicide by people worshiping Zuckerberg.
Facebook has convinced millions of people to give up vast amounts of private information to an apparatus that would make the Stasi or KGB drool.
Part of cult indoctrination is giving up personal and private information, documents, secrets and property to participate and become part of the whole. Meanwhile, leaders profit from the property and information given up and use secrets to blackmail or breakdown an individual's identity so they become dependent on the group.
Unfortunately your use case, while valid, is for a very small demographic. In general people want the guaranteed experience that locked in products give them.
A lot of people like to sideline complain about that, but tech is no longer its own customer -- there are billions of users who have different preferences than us and they are a lot more lucrative.
People opted into several of these services before they were "locked in", many of whom never noticed the switch of XMPP backplanes in Facebook Messages and GTalk. Some of them haven't even seemed to notice the loss of a few technically minded friends from their messenger windows, changes in branding, and or even really changes in apps. The ambivalence is not a preference or a "want" for a locked in experience. There isn't even a preference for a type of experience: the general human thought process is "I want to talk to my friend Jim" never "I want to use [Facebook Messenger/Google Hangouts/SMS/smoke signals] to talk to my friend Jim".
I've seen people that ritualistically open certain apps to talk to certain friends and networks of friends, but have no idea what apps they are using beyond the background navigation needs of "the one with the fuzzy green icon on my last page" and "the blue one with the annoying notifications".
Locked in platforms are a consequence of network efforts, not a "preference" for some mystical "guaranteed experience": the experience and the platform don't matter if the social interactions aren't there.
The diaspora of communications platforms hasn't hit home to the average consumer yet, and it's currently background inconvenience that people are using five to ten different apps to communicate these days in some cases, but that doesn't mean average consumers are entirely ignorant of the situation either. (To some extent that's why OS-level notification systems have become so important to the average consumer; at least when you have a half-dozen messenging apps all the notifications arrive in the same place.)
This is what I thought. If one were starting a new messaging platform, how would you implement the Signal protocol from scratch I wonder? I'm assuming for people who don't have strong security backgrounds, this means dissecting the Signal source code from Github.
> I'm assuming for people who don't have strong security backgrounds
That's already a bad start.
You mean inventing Signal from scratch (which is rough) or incorporating the libsignal protocol into a new messaging app?
All of the libsignal repos have a good readme that explains init [1][2] , so you can start there. Browsing Signal source is helpful not so much to understand the protocol, but to see if any special precautions were taken against side-channel and other implementation pitfalls.
I mean, you could contract moxie (hey moxie, what's your price?)
EDIT: there's also this [3] independent implementation of libsignal in golang that tries to make some targeted modifications to fit their need. Can't vouch for its quality, but it's an interesting effort nonetheless.
It may be a bad start, but if we want to see this implemented in many products at a large scale, you'll have to expect that not everyone is a security expert.
I swear HN has become riddled with people who want to be contrarian for the sake of being so.
No, I'm just repeating the oft-said maxim of 'Don't Roll Your Own Crypto' [1] (which applies in the form of know-what-you're-doing-while-implementing-someone-else's-crypto) while emphasizing that you should probably be a domain expert in the domain you're developing in. If I know nothing about High Frequency Trading or Oil Exploration, I wouldn't want to be coding for it at all, and nor would my employer.
I believe it's a reasonable expectation that people who implement secure messaging be domain experts in crypto AND messaging.
Getting high-grade security right is exceptionally hard.
There's a saying about sex: make one mistake and you have to support it for the rest of your life. Security and cryptography are orders of magnitude worse. It's bad enough that errors compound, but it doesn't end there. You can have subtle and counter-intuitive failure modes where a single step outside the happy path is enough to completely annihilate the security of your system.
I feel there is no analogy that could capture the absurd complexity and catastrophic failure potential.
To give some background - I've been working with applied crypto since 90's, and professionally (on and off) since early 2000's. That experience is still next to worthless: I know for a fact that I am not good enough to actually implement anything that could withstand the attacks of a motivated and well-funded adversary. (Or even that of a bored PhD student.)
The best I can do is find tools and components that have been battle hardened by the handful few exceptional professionals. At least that way my hubris shouldn't amount to too much damage.
You shouldn't have many different people implementing critical crypto code; that'll lead to horrible broken implementations and compromise of security.
> "We don't want to disrupt people's current experience."
You don't say? (not you, Facebook) How about the dozens of times Facebook disrupted the user experience of the service for its own benefit? How about the dozen+ times it changed people's settings from private to public, after people previously manually enabled a certain setting to be private, or after having a setting by default as private initially and letting people believe that such action is private? Wasn't THAT disrupting to users' experience?
Of course it was. But it benefited Facebook, and that's the difference here. They just don't want to "disrupt" the experience in a way that also hurts the company's bottom line, even if it's better for users.
In other words, it's just a weak excuse for not doing it by default, or at least allowing people to always set it as default (although knowing Facebook, I'd probably worry that they'd revert it back to non-E2E without even making it obvious that it did that. Announcing a new privacy policy change doesn't really count).
> No secure way to verify code or store keys without routing through mobile.
Weeeeeeell, not quite. Every device and browser the user uses can get it's own private key, and then you use Facebook's central servers and SSL to exchange keys.
If I don't trust Facebook for key exchange, then I can't trust them with their app. Any encryption they implement, they can trivially circumvent by putting a backdoor in their app.
But if I trust their (closed source, frequently updated) app at all, then I can trust them to relay people my public keys. Especially since MITM can be discovered by comparing hashes over a hard to manipulate channel (telefone, video, or IRL).
And if you're really paranoid, you could think about using an open-source app and letting a trusted third party handle the keys.
Yes I completely agree. Actually, what is the difference in security between an app that generates a key pair on first use and exchanges the public key via a 3rd party servers and a web application doing exactly that. As long as the connection is secure and you trust the 3rd party for not having you send the private key to them, the model seems reasonably secure for both scenarios.
Though public key exchange can be improved on mobile by better direct communication capabilities like barcode scanning, rfid, bluetooth etc.
Am I missing something or is this more of a "JS is not reliably fast on all devices so we rather don't" kind of thing?
I assume the issue is more to do with private key storage on the device. JS provides several local storage mechanisms, but none of them have cryptographic guarantees and all are potentially vulnerable to attacks like XSS and "attacks" like development console disclosure. There's been calls for the Web Application Platform to standardize on an HTML5 "Key Store" for cryptography, but thus far it doesn't sound like any consensus has been managed to be reached on how that key store would operate.
Certainly, there are mitigations such as very short lived private keys and relying on existing sandboxing and XSS protections browsers already have to do for JS local storages, but it's easy to understand how from a paranoia standpoint there's no guaranteed safe key store just yet in a browser, especially not one backed up by OS-level security guarantees as one would be able to use on mobile devices.
That's all fine, but why isn't there a setting somewhere, where I can just knowingly choose "always use end-to-end encryption" at least?
The way it's implemented now still makes it a pain/inconvenient thing to do when you want private conversations. So let's face it. Facebook just wants to get away with the minimum necessary to convey that it cares about privacy, while knowing that only 0.1% of the conversations will ever be encrypted this way.
The fact that "We don't want to disrupt people's current experience." did not previously outweigh other considerations does not mean it is not a consideration. It does imply an upper bound on the weight though.
I recently started using Wire and liked the richer feature set. But I'd say it still has some way to go on usability, features and speed. I hope you look at Telegram as an inspiration on those (not on crypto though, where you seem to have the one commonly accepted as the best).
- FBM is multi-device, and we'd like to see E2E usability improve to support this. For now, pick one device and keys never leave it
- Secret conversations don't currently support popular features like searching message history, switching devices, voice/video, etc
- Hundreds of millions use Messenger from a web browser. No secure way to verify code or store keys without routing through mobile.
"We don't want to disrupt people's current experience."
Source: https://twitter.com/alexstamos