I don't see an issue as signal is designed not to trust the server. Signal also uses sealed sender and Perfect Forward Secrecy, which is something almost all e2ee messengers lack. What it means in practice is signal leaks very little if any metadata, if you leak metadata you give away details about who your talking to and for how long, etc. Examples might include talking with a suicide hotline, or a doctor, maybe a customer service agent at a company and for how long. Those details will give a lot away about you, even if the messages or calls themselves are encrypted. Matrix is not recommended for communication because it fails to properly hide metadata and actively trusts the servers. When you make a call on signal, as long as both users have "Always Relay Calls" set to disabled, your calls will be peer to peer instead of trusting a central server to facilitate the connection and trusting a middle man. What this means is since the connection is peer to peer you can leak your IP address to the user you're talking to, however a VPN fixes this issue.
Thanks for taking the time to reply. There are multiple issues with centralization.
A prime one is that the entity that you (have no choice but to) trust today will eventually turn against you at some point down the road. In the case of Signal, the writing is on the wall already: using a 3rd party client is against Signal's ToS, and Signal has been seen pushing controversial features like crypto payments that, as a user of their captive ecosystem, you have no choice but to engage with.
Signal is an entity that's incorporated in a jurisdiction and might be compelled by law not to provide service for certain users, or to degrade its encryption to comply with the local regulator. Using a centralized service like Signal makes you an easily identifiable/prime target in such a scenario.
No matter what Signal says, nobody but themselves can verify what code runs on their servers, and what amount of logging/data processing goes there. Because every account checks in through them, because every message is routed through them, there is no technical barrier to knowing who's who, who's talking to whom and when, with the nature of the communication (text, video, image, …) from which a lot can be inferred. As far as I understand the American law, any agency could tap into that, either directly, or via Amazon on which the whole thing is running. I am not paranoid enough to believe that 3 letter agencies belong to one's typical threat model, but with SGX contact discovery from phone number and sealed senders, Signal kindah panders to those? Either way, those are unverifiable mitigations to problems that decentralized systems do not have.
I could go on and on, but the first one is the main one IMO: we are past the need to trust anybody with our instant messaging and put a fundamental aspect of our lives at the mercy of (geo)political and societal woes. That's practically a solved problem in the opensource world, and we can make it ethical and sustainable by just opting out of the dominative model of monopolistic and centralized systems.
Unfortunately this is not enough. A malicious Signal server can mount a timing correlation attack and infer the social graph of an user. Having a centralized server makes it more difficult to mitigate such risk.
Relying on a centralized service can still be problematic. If nothing else it's a central point of failure, even if you don't have any particular privacy concerns due to the usage of end-to-end encryption. Signal also relies on Intel SGX for some of their privacy features on the server, which is somewhat dubious. AFAIK this is currently mostly used for contact discovery, which would otherwise be an even worse situation, but it has seemed in the past like they were interested in expanding this, though maybe that's just all speculation. Regardless, my main concern with signal being centralized is that you have a lot less control over your chat. Signal can change on a moments notice and it's all just gone.
Yes and no. decentralization is great for a lot of reasons but it does come with downsides. I don't know about you, but i convinced my family and friends to use and keep Signal for years now and i don't think i would have had such luck with Matrix/Element, let alone a p2p app.
I'm glad decentralized options exist and think they deserve more funding and love, however.
He is dodgy af. Doesn't want any Signal forks (Molly being the only one tolerated) and won't let them connect to the server. That's why the open source version LibreSignal was shut down. He also doesn't want Signal to be on F-Droid, a store which only allows 100% free/open source software.
Take everything coming out of his mouth with a grain of salt.
"It’s what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP". Doesn't he also notice a certain thing in common? Y'know, that they turned hostile?
Yes. You're right. When you make a post you probably should give a body to it rather than just a link to a project. Why do you think it's a better signal? Otherwise people aren't going to find it super useful
Most people are not going to click the link, they might click in to see what you're talking about, but you just link to something else, so most people are just going to charitably just go away.
I wouldn't recommend using fdroid due to security concerns. When you download a fdroid so it is signed by fdroid instead of the developer, what this means it's if fdroid gets hacked all your fdroid apps are insecure and can receive malicious updates. You also trust fdroid as another party in the chain, when in reality you should remove as many parties as possible. They also tend to host outdated apps with no updates in years. Use obtainium as it will pull directly from the developers GitHub page and will be signed by the developer instead.
Now if someone could make a desktop app (perhaps using Qt or some similar cross-platform toolkit) that isn’t Electron bloatware, for all the people who don’t have a few spare CPU cores and gigabytes of RAM to spend on a messaging client.
I don't understand. What makes Molly more trustworthy than Signal, if they both use the same central sever? The website doesn't really provide much data.
How does that work, though? It's the same servers and protocols, right? So it would verify with an sms. Or is Molly not compatible with Signal (Molly users talking with Signal users), and I'm just completely misunderstanding the statement of being a hardened Signal?
This is actually more than welcome. I never understood why you could have your signal on your phone and ipad, but not on two phones. Applaud molly to do so!
The RAM shredding feature seems kind of silly to me, but I don't know the details. Ideally the operating system should clear pages before giving them to other applications... While I can see the appeal in also doing it in the application, it seems kinda wasteful, and I wouldn't trust the application to do a good job of that anyway. If the point is to prevent the app itself from leaking private keys on a buffer overflow or whatever... I guess I can see the value of that, but I'd rather see mitigations for the buffer overflows highlighted instead. I guess this just makes me a little suspicious of the actual value provided by the app.
I'm not an Android dev, but at first glance it looks like all this does is try to allocate all of the free memory in the system, and walks through the pages and uses rand() to fill in all of the bytes. Technically it's possible for the pages returned by malloc to contain old data, but only if it was allocated by your process in the first place (maybe that's not the case on Android?)... So I guess the idea is that if Molly itself is compromised and an attacker is able to allocate memory in the Molly process they could conceivably get an old page from memory and that page might contain secrets from the Molly app itself... But at that point, surely you're fucked anyway, and the attacker can presumably read all of the currently allocated memory which is certainly far more of a security concern anyway? I just don't think it's worth the cycles.
That’s fair. Just when applications tout dubious security features it makes me a little sceptical of the expertise of the developers. At the very least I’m disappointed that they don’t have more details on this. If it is valuable, I’d be interested to hear more about it.