The scariest part of this recent news is that TM Signal seem(ed) to be interoperable. People using TM Signal could interact with actual Signal users. How are you to know whether or not your groups have people using bastardized versions of Signal? Are things like Session interoperable with Signal?
Signal isn’t that kind of app. It protects your data in flight, but only has minimal protections after the recipient gets the message. It’s a whole other game to protect data at the endpoint. If you can’t trust your recipients to protect data, then you shouldn’t send them data needing protection. In order to do that you need control over all levels of the device receiving the data, hardware, operating system, file system, and software. Anything else will always leave openings for data at rest at tge destination to be compromised by untrustworthy recipients.
It’s their computing and their devices, not yours.
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No. Even if they were, the are plenty of ways to capture the messages.
Definitely. Capturing the messages isn’t my concern though as much as interacting with non authentic clients
What is your worry about non authentic clients?
Poor security implementations that would become the weakest link in the security chain
Well yes, anyone can compile its own version of Signal and use it and it will work as long as there aren’t some major changes to its communication protocol
The direct answer to your question is: verification of the security of the platform that the other party is using is outside of the scope of the Signal protocol. Anything you send to the other party can be taken off of their device. Signal only concerns itself with securing the message over the network and making it hard for an adversary with network dominance to build a social graph. It doesn’t protect from all SIGINT.
Additionally, since the server is open source and the protocol is open an publicly documented, it is completely possible to build your own Signal client and give it whatever capabilities that you’d like.
There are several open source packages available that allow you to interface with Signal without using the official Signal client:
https://github.com/AsamK/signal-cli
https://gitlab.com/signald/signald (also, https://signald.org/articles/clients/ )
Any signal conversation can be archived
What is the threat model where this matters? You have to trust the recipient with Signal. The only one I can think of is the case where your recipient is using a compromised fork and is unaware. In this case, talking about the tool and checking with them about what they are using is really the only countermeasure.
Yeah, that’s a good point. For me it’s mostly family that is not very technical, so I’m not too concerned of them using a fork.
I’m out of the loop what’s going on?
Some photographer took a picture of a politician in the Trump admin using a Signal clone. That signal clone allowed the user to archive chats to a third party.
Thanks, that’s…interesting. He doesn’t seem like the type to find and try obscure apps for fun
