This is why as a security engineer and researcher even I do not have a Signal account. My conversation with Moxie about Signal convinced me that Signal cannot be trusted as they are obsessed with centralized control and user tracking, via app store stats. Privacy assurances come from enclaves internet randos can freely manipulate as they chose not to implement full source bootstrapped remote attestation. Also relying on app stores that can, with a court order, ship anyone an extra special fork of signal with compromised encryption, and they will never know. But F-Droid with independent control and reproducible builds? Unacceptable to Signal. Their stance is use proprietary partner platforms with their centralized servers so you can be tracked and backdoored at any time or GTFO.

Centralized comms that force you to identify yourself and use proprietary software are an enemy of a free society.

I do not understand the true goals of Signal, but their actions are inconsistent with their stated ones.

This is not even getting started on their Mobilecoin premine scam that was a blatant conflict of interest and a wildly blatant violation of their non-profit charter given Moxies financial ties to Mobilecoin.

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slopinthebag 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I just want to point out that this comment is almost certainly a false flag “privacy conscious” personality who is attempting to discredit Signal to push people away from reasonable and usable private options towards a nihilist approach to privacy. If the usable solutions aren’t “truly” private you might as well stop caring and just use the more convenient alternatives which freely share all their data with governments.

Either that or they’ve been manipulated into believing this, which is actually more powerful in the long term. Either way, people should ignore these types of takes.

	▲	lrvick 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Rather than refute any of my points the best you could do is try to discredit me and say "No one listen to this heretic that has concerns with Signal!"

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pstuart 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Is there an alternative out there that you do trust that is "noob friendly"?

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Cider9986 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You don't need an alternative. Signal is the best private messenger in terms of privacy and usability.

SimpleX has more privacy and anonymity but has worse usability.

Matrix has terrible metadata privacy and terrible usability.

	▲	lrvick 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Matrix has terrible metadata privacy Federated, can run server and have strong metadata privacy talking to your family but still talk to people on other servers publicly when you wish so you have choices to control your privacy as much as you wish. > Signal is the best private messenger in terms of privacy and usability. Requires proprietary operating systems, a phone number, and centralized US infrastructure where all network metadata lands in one place for much easier timing analysis. With MobileCoin, which was definitely something all users wanted and great messenger UX. Right.

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lrvick 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My daily driver for family, friends, and coworkers is Element/Matrix.

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fwn 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> [Signal is] obsessed with [...] user tracking, via app store stats.

Not sure about that. You do not need Google Play Store to download or update Signal. I use Obtainium to update directly via signal.org for a very long time now.

JSON: https://updates.signal.org/android/latest.json

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lrvick 14 hours ago | parent [-]

You can sideload (for now) but that forces you to enable "unknown sources" and increase the attack surface on your device, forcing you to reproduce every new release from source by hand to verify it was not compromised... or blindly sideload binaries and just hope your IP address was not served an extra special one.

Moxie -knew- this was a path almost no one has time to use safely and liked it that way. He actively blocked attempts by the community to put Signal in f-droid, so in cases where it is the system package manager, automated signed reproducible builds can be updated painlesssly. By his own admission, moxie blocked convenient and secure community package managers because he wants most installs to happen from Google Play or the App Store so he gets analytics.

In the end Molly made it to f-droid anyway and Signal has no way to stop it, but they actively discourage the use of any binaries they did not compile and cannot track and modify at any time.

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fwn 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Reproducible builds are nice, and I would love to have them for Signal. But I think I disagree with most of what you've written.

Enabling "unknown sources" does not make my device less secure. The setting is also disingenuously named: It is in fact "known sources" I am installing (not "sideloading") software from. It is just not a source Google wants to know of.

I also do not need to reproduce every new release from source. It is a signed APK I'm getting from signal.org.

If the antagonists in my threat model are so capable they could serve a tailored, signed APK from signal.org for the IP I'm using, I should absolutely not use a messenger whose identifier is my phone number, aka my real world identity AND permanent location marker. That feels absurd. A threat actor that capable could just locate me, pick me up and shake me until I unlock the device.

You are saying Molly exists and works fine, so I'm not really sure the whole problematization of Signal holds up. Does the existence of Molly not disprove your criticism that users would have to use the mainline Signal app from the Play Store?

I think it might be a good sign that criticism of Signal tends to presuppose absurdly capable threat actors. It suggests there is little low-hanging fruit left to criticize.

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lrvick 13 hours ago | parent [-]

> Enabling "unknown sources" does not make my device less secure. The setting is also disingenuously named: It is in fact "known sources" I am installing (not "sideloading") software from. It is just not a source Google wants to know of.

By disabling signature verification you open yourself up to man-in-the-middle attacks and supply chain attacks. How do you know the signal CDN account was not compromised to serve certain IP addresses different signal binaries with backdoors? Independent reproducible build signatures, like f-droid supports, are the only way out of this, which f-droid offered to do and was refused. Accountability was refused.

> If the antagonists in my threat model are so capable they could serve a tailored, signed APK from signal.org for the IP I'm using, I should absolutely not use a messenger whose identifier is my phone number, aka my real world identity AND permanent location marker. That feels absurd. A threat actor that capable could just locate me, pick me up and shake me until I unlock the device.

Do you think the Signal team signs all their Android binaries in a full source bootstrapped secure enclave that requires a quorum of signal team members to sign each release following their own deterministic builds and code review to ensure only a -single- variant of every version of Signal exists with multi-party verified code with multi-party verified signatures?

It would be weird to keep it secret if they did all this work for public safety. I do this sort of thing for most projects and am pretty loud about it so people understand they do not need to trust me.

Instead, it is likely how everyone else does it. A release engineer builds and signs it with a key they fully control, that could be coerced or bribed or given a secret court order.

That is a massive massive single point of failure for a messenger whose goal is supposedly privacy without having to trust the Signal foundation.

Their negligence in supply chain security gives them, Google, and Apple an incredible amount of power to covertly backdoor any conversation at any time, for seemingly no reason.

> You are saying Molly exists and works fine, so I'm not really sure the whole problematization of Signal holds up. Does the existence of Molly not disprove your criticism that you have to use the mainline Signal app?

Molly only helps if both sides of the conversation are using it. At that point the network effects of Signal, and the privacy loss of being forced to identify yourself, no longer makes sense. Both parties could use an open network alternative instead.

Also I personally do not use Android or iOS so I am not welcome on the Signal network at all afaict.

	▲	fwn 12 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> By disabling signature verification you open yourself up to man-in-the-middle attacks and supply chain attacks. I am no expert, but AFAIK Android does not disable signature verification when installing from "unknown" sources. It verifies the APK is signed and unmodified on every install, and enforces key continuity on updates. Signal uses the same signing key for both the Play Store and signal.org APK, so if you at any point installed from the Play Store, the key identity is (as far as I understood) attested by Google, and every subsequent update from either source is verified against it. I do think that Obtainium pins the key as well, so even without Play Store: If the original install through Obtainium wasn't a manipulated version, you should enjoy the same continuity. I get the idea about a hypothetical threat actor from within Signal poisoning my specific install. But I think I'll roll with it for now.

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BuildTheRobots 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I do not understand the true goals of Signal, but their actions are inconsistent with their stated ones.

I've been annoyed and suspicious since they stopped being TextSecure and dropped support for SMS messages, and still don't buy the reasons given.

It started as offering opportunistic end-to-end encryption on "direct" (SMS) communications to help privacy. It didn't even need a data connection. People bought into it and as an Android user it was good [1]. Data then got added. First boiling frogs to the side, and then SMS support was removed completely, for what I still think are disingenuous reasons (see [1]), and the summary of it's technically impossible and not worth it. Trust us.

So what did we get? Well instead of leaking metadata to my phone provider, I'm now sending even more metadata to signal. They've put themselves in the path of every kex, every message, every group chat, every call, every read-recipt. Moxie Marlinspike is my new Santa; he knows when I'm sleeping and he knows when I'm awake.

And for something sold as privacy, what the heck is with their Linkedin-be-proud dark pattern of convincing people to upload their contacts (it's safe - honest!), or announcing proudly that "contact I haven't spoken to in 15 years and for good reason" has joined signal! Would I like to connect with the person I was really hoping had forgot I existed and was only saving the number so I could make sure I never answered it? Yes please - and I hope you told them that as well - FML... I'm also suspicious about the encrypted cloud backups, but that might just be me.

They also spent years making it difficult for people on de-googled phones, or to use it on desktop, or to run their own servers, or to run custom clients which seemed at odds with encrypt-all-the-things.

I should be happy about the mass adoption of the encryption protocol. I should see WhatsApp adopting it just before they got bought out by Facebook as a win for privacy for the common folk. I should trust it more now that there's so many eyes on it. I should be in no way suspicious of the lack serious objection the lack of LA provision by the authorities, or the fact Spy-on-You INC would continue buying the messaging platform they can no longer look at.

Things have felt off for a while and I wouldn't be shocked to see it on a future list alongside EncroChat, or Sky ECC, or Exclu or maybe even ANOM - a honeypot from the start. I can't prove anything, and don't know anything, but it sets _all_ of my "there's something wrong and I don't know what it is" senses tingling. But also I'm pretty bad at feelings. Maybe I just need to wee, or drink more water. My gut feel still insists there's a pattern to my RSA dongle's one time codes, so really you shouldn't believe a single word I've said.

[1] There were issues. iirc it didn't work on Apple devices, sms is bad for images and group chats, it broke in a messy but easily bypassed (& fixable) way and it would never work for calls. It also still leaked metadata to the phone network. And SMS is just fundamentally dead and costly - but it absolutely served a purpose.

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Cider9986 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>This is why as a security engineer and researcher even I do not have a Signal account.

Signal is regarded as the best mainstream messenger by many security professionals.

>they are obsessed with centralized control and user tracking, via app store stats.

Do you have any evidence they are obsessed with user tracking via all store stats? It seems reasonable to use any stats given to try to improve your app. Signal doesn't control the app stores and looking at provided stats doesn't compromise their users privacy.

"Obsessed" is a weird way to personify a company. Signal chose centralization because it's best for UX which is clear when they have 100x the users of Matrix while being more private.

>Also relying on app stores that can, with a court order

What law would legally require Apple or Google to do this? Signal doesn't rely on app stores on android as you can a signed apk download directly from them. Other apps like Element or SimpleX also are distributed on app stores.

>ship anyone an extra special fork of signal with compromised encryption, and they will never know.

This is wrong. "Anyone" can clearly not do this or it would have happened to a single app in history, and yet it has not. It would be trivially detected through reverse engineering and would only ever happen in an insane targeted attack which is not in the threat model of 99.9⁹% of people. It wouldn't be the easiest attack and authorities would use something like Pegasus instead.

>But F-Droid with independent control and reproducible builds? Unacceptable to Signal. Their stance is use proprietary partner platforms with their centralized servers so you can be tracked and backdoored at any time or GTFO.

FDroid has had terrible security practices in the past. Not sure their current status but it's not recommended by GrapheneOS.

Proprietary software is not less secure by default and can be analyzed.

>Centralized comms that force you to identify yourself and use proprietary software are an enemy of a free society.

Signal can be used without any proprietary software on GrapheneOS and by downloading Signal from their website. iOS and Android are proprietary anyway so your aren't avoiding it on those OSes.

>I do not understand the true goals of Signal, but their actions are inconsistent with their stated ones.

Their goal is more privacy for everyone, which they are clearly quite good at achieving with their skyrocketing user counts.

>This is not even getting started on their Mobilecoin premine scam that was a blatant conflict of interest and a wildly blatant violation of their non-profit charter given Moxies financial ties to Mobilecoin.

This was bad but I respect the intentions. They should have worked on Monero instead. It doesn't compromise their apps privacy, though.