Another thing is also that email itself was not designed with encryption in mind and because it is decentralized and backwards-compatible it is hard to enforce new rules (everyone should use PGP).

But PGP is useful if both sender and receiver agree to use PGP.

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woodruffw 18 hours ago | parent [-]

> But PGP is useful if both sender and receiver agree to use PGP.

Anecdotally: this works until you add a third person who responds to the thread in plain text, with everything threaded beneath. Or when you do that by accident.

Applied cryptographers will tell you to use Signal or any other E2EE chat.

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user3939382 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Signal isn’t owned by the users and independent of third parties the way PGP/GPG is so regardless of who will or won’t suggest a substitute it’s not.

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woodruffw 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why is “owned by the users” (whatever that means) the quality you’re testing cryptographic protocols against?

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TFNA 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Signal's has buildable source code on the client side and all. However, the server code is closed source and the developers have made disquieting changes like uploading most users' contact lists to the server protected only by Intel SGX that is known to have vulnerabilities exploitable by a nation-scale actor.

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woodruffw 16 hours ago | parent [-]

The point of E2EE is that you don't need to trust the server that you're talking through. A secure E2EE scheme is secure in the presence of an actively malicious server.

I think SGX is a red herring in this context. You can find it risky or not, but it's (1) not material to Signal's E2EE property, and (2) materially better than email, which sends all contact metadata in plaintext, regardless of whether you try and encrypt your message bodies. Bringing it up in this context seems like a category error.

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cowlevel 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Is this accounting for the fact that they kill people based on metadata? More technically complex and unreliable protocols such as SimpleX attempt to also protect the metadata.

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woodruffw 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Is what accounting for that? If you're worried about metadata leaks, you shouldn't be using email, full stop.

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TFNA 4 hours ago | parent [-]

By "metadata" GP is presumably talking, as I was, about Signal uploading most users' contact lists to the server with weak protection.

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akerl_ 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The point is that if the comparison point is PGP-encrypted email, which has no protection for any metadata and passes it on the wire in the clear, raising concerns about Signal’s metadata protections makes no sense.

	▲	TFNA a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		In the context of this whole big thread, the point is that neither infamously leaky PGP nor Signal keep metadata secure from nation-level actors.

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gatlin 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

XMPP + omemo