[HN Gopher] Improving Signal's Sealed Sender (2021)
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Improving Signal's Sealed Sender (2021)
Author : ementally
Score : 50 points
Date : 2023-03-07 18:02 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ndss-symposium.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ndss-symposium.org)
| ShrimpHawk wrote:
| from 2021
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| palata wrote:
| Interesting analysis! Showing (once again) that anonymity is
| difficult to achieve.
| godelski wrote:
| FYI I don't think Signal cares much about anonymity (sadly). I've
| seen several discussions on their forums where admins have even
| been hostile to people asking for it. I love Signal, but its
| community is toxic and I really wish the devs would move a bit
| faster. I know it is a tall order, but that's what Moxie argued
| in his "The Ecosystem is Moving" talk (we can't have
| decentralized because you have to move fast and adapt). There's a
| lot of low hanging fruit that Signal just seems to ignore.
| tptacek wrote:
| However much they care or don't care about it, the salience of
| this NDSS paper is that Signal has a relatively complex
| anonymity feature that no other mainstream messenger has (the
| ability to cryptographically authenticate a message that can be
| delivered via the service without the client authenticating to
| the server), and it's susceptible to some straightforward
| network timing analyses.
|
| There may be any number of other reasons to believe that Signal
| doesn't care enough about anonymity, but with respect to this
| paper, the most you can say is that they don't get full credit
| for an extra credit anonymity project they did.
| phneutral26 wrote:
| Consider adding 2021 to the post title, for clarity. Anyhow,
| interesting article. Thanks for sharing.
| tandr wrote:
| Did Signal fix the protocol, or at least responded with
| something?
| ementally wrote:
| Nope, according to https://community.signalusers.org/t/sealed-
| sender-still-brok...
| wkat4242 wrote:
| That's pretty bad 2 years later..
| tptacek wrote:
| I guess? This is an anonymity feature no other mainstream
| messenger has in the first place. The idea behind sealed
| sender is that clients can send messages through Signal's
| service without authenticating directly to the server. It's
| not, like, part of the core E2E mechanic of Signal; I'm not
| even sure it was ever out of beta.
| upofadown wrote:
| The suggested fix was pretty complicated and had some
| drawbacks (see section VII-B). Signal probably did not
| agree that it was worth it. It's a hard problem and it just
| might be the case that no one has of yet come up with a
| workable solution.
| autoexec wrote:
| My impression is that since around 2020 Signal devs have been
| trying as quietly as possible to tell people that the service can
| no longer be trusted and everyone should switch to something
| else. First they started keeping sensitive user data in the cloud
| which upset and alienated a bunch of users, they've also refused
| to update their privacy policy to reflect that fact, then they
| added the weird crypto thing which upset more users, and killing
| off the ability to handle SMS/MMS as well as secure
| communications, one of their best features, seems like yet
| another attempt drive away users. Maybe going years without
| fixing important features with known vulnerabilities is just
| another hint being left to ward off anyone who really needs their
| communications secure.
|
| I loved signal and recommended it to many people over the years,
| but I ditched it after they started collecting and insecurely
| storing user data in the cloud, and I'm still disappointed in
| what it has turned into. The folks behind Signal had a great
| project once and I hope someone outside of the US steps up to
| give us a real replacement one of these days.
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