This is an article written by telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov in 2019 on “Why whatsapp will never be secure”. Your thoughts?
What a load of hipocrisy. The dude uses unauthenticated DH for his apps “secret chats”, which a bored student with a laptop can MITM in seconds. Other chats use just TLS, meaning they get to read EVERYTHING.
Use Signal, people.
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which a bored student with a laptop can MITM in seconds
No, how can a bored student breach e2ee in seconds? note that no such cases have been reported by any telegram user so far.
Because the DH is unauthenticated, as I already said. Users can’t report it because there is no way to tell for them.
Users can’t report it because there is no way to tell for them
Atleast the one who breached can tell? no telegram users data have been seen on dark web yet, no person/org have claimed to get any vulnerability in their system. Also if its that easy to breach why govt’s keep banning telegram for not giving them userdata? despite telegram is the biggest app where most terrorist orgs operate, hub of piracy and illegal things, you can call it “public” darkweb.
if its that easy to breach why govt’s keep banning telegram for not giving them userdata
Same reason they ask Apple for backdoors even though they crack iPhones routinely. It’s about legal precedent.
They dont ban apple tho
The data is available. See this article - it’s a Google link.
Check stories about russian journalists…
I have some friends working in the police, many years they showed me how they can read messages of like anyone on telegram I was trying to tell people to stop using telegram for years, but now at least therecs some conversation is going on because of the journalists
Signal is based in the United States, enjoy having CIA and NSA reading all your messages.
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Telegram backend is still closed-source, btw
Clicking the link gives me the following warning:
The site ahead may contain harmful programs
Firefox blocked this page because it might try to trick you into installing programs that harm your browsing experience (for example, by changing your homepage or showing extra ads on sites you visit).
weird, works for me in firefox with all privacy features enabled, can you please try this link: https://telegra.ph/Why-WhatsApp-Will-Never-Be-Secure-05-15
Your original link is blocked at DNS level on my ‘Threat intelligence’ blocklist.
And that link is blocked at DNS level by ‘Toxic’ and ‘Stop Forum Spam’ filters.
So it’s blocked before the browser can even connect for me.
I got the same warning for the original link with ff as well.
Your comment link didn’t throw up a red flag.
sorry for the inconvenience, thing is this website supports multiple domains and is banned in some countries so we have to use different domains to access it, which might give red flags.
Great, thank you!
He writes as if signal’s devs would have to be quiet about whatsapps encryption
E.g.
Last year, the founders of WhatsApp left the company due to concerns over users’ privacy [16]. They are surely tied by either gag orders or NDAs, so are unable to discuss backdoors publicly without risking their fortunes and freedom. They were able to admit, however, that “they sold their users’ privacy” [17].
Yet signal published multiple posts about how secure whatsapp is. I don’t buy it but it’s not like they would be quiet. (They=moxie) https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/ https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
I believe Moxie helped them integrate Signal protocol into WA successfully while preserving user integrity and privacy.
However, it wouldnt be out of the realm for them to make modifications to their custom protocol that Moxie helped design, and turn it into a privacy nightmare after the fact.
Exactly
WhatsApp will be never private and secure, while Telegram will be never private. 😁
Who said telegram is secure?
No one said the opposite, while on WhatsApp they had several vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to get the user phone control.
An example: https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/new-whatsapp-bug-couldve-let-attackers.html
But there were many more vulnerabilities or “features” that WhatsApp allowed attackers or governments to get into user data. While I haven’t read anything about against Telegram security.
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It is secure as secure is logging into your bank account from your web browser.
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I think you are mixing concepts, encryptions isn’t related to “secure” but to “privacy”. On my example, your data on bank is encrypted via SSL which the server has the private key to read it, but it is encrypted. Telegram is the same, your messages are being encrypted by a public key owned by the server, but it is encrypted, just not end to end.
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Guys, please stop using telegram if you care for your security and privacy
Telegram is not fully open source, sometimes they release the source, but the hashes of the builds don’t even match (so it’s a different source code) 🚩
Zero transparency about data handling, even when they get caught they don’t tell details 🚩 (Telegram in the recent years has got really shady reputation)
Very often ways they implement security is weird: non open source app, non open source server, leaking APIs, use of phone numbers, at some point they started asking for an email, non encrypted chats by default, never encrypted group chats… it can continue forever 🚩
Non-standard encryption is a real red flag, non-open-source 🚩
I know some people that work/worked for the police, and they can read all the messages easy peasy, i was trying to tell to the people many years ago, but everyone was so amused by the stickers. Now you can just read stories of the journalists and activists, and how they got imprisoned with the use telegram 👁️🗨️💀
PLEASE, STOP USING TELEGRAM IF YOU CARE FOR YOUR PRIVACY OR SECURITY
Except if you open source server, there’s no way to verify it is using same code anyways and their client is already open source so waste point.
sometimes they release the source, but the hashes of the builds don’t even match.
When did this happen? Source?
Signal asks phone numbers, emails are universally known. If you don’t want to give them your real phone number, buy one from fragment.com (their web3 service where they sell phone number for crypto). Emails are already public and they ask them only for recovery process and its opt on so there’s no problem with that.
All chats are encrypted by default from private to group using mtproto, where there have been no breaches found yet so stop spreading misinformation.
Again telling personal experience which maybe lie, can you share source of your claims? Which journalist got arrested due to telegram?
You can go and check yourself mr. Senior Officer of FSB, i don’t want to fight for your war
This is a very good reminder why one should worry about the new messaging standard for interoperability.
WhatsApp users resilient enough not to fall for constant popups telling them to back up their chats can still be traced by a number of other tricks – from accessing their contacts’ backups to invisible encryption key changes [13]. The metadata generated by WhatsApp users – logs describing who chats with whom and when – is leaked to all kinds of agencies in large volumes by WhatsApp’s parent company [14].
It even might result in me thinking that we should have to ban facebook from entering the fediverse because people are lazy and don’t switch to the real fediverse if they can see your posts and contact you directly.
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This is not about getting the data. This data is public.
It’s about market power
Both WhatsApp and Telegram suck. Just like any other messenger that’s either proprietary or not end to end encrypted. Signal is clearly the best choice.
Signal is not the best choice, it’s just a somewhat aceptable middle ground. I prefer something that doesn’t require a phone number and something you can self-host, like XMPP.
Good luck convincing normies to use some obscure messaging protocol. It’s difficult with Signal, even harder with Matrix, basically impossible with XMPP. 99.99999% have never in their life heard about XMPP. Also most mobile clients absolutely suck. You also can’t get proper push notifications without completely ruining your battery life. What a great choice!
I don’t see a big difference, the hardest thing by itself is convincing someone to install one more program or app. Also Conversations does not suck.
Conversations is only available on Android. And that’s the problem. You need different clients on different plattforms, etc. It’s just a mess. Some clients don’t support encryption and everything is just unnecessarily complicated, especially for new users. You can’t just tell someone “let’s chat on XMPP”. You need to explain to them what XMPP is, what app to download depending on what OS they use, tell them how to set everything up, etc, etc…
Signal is definitely not perfect, but it’s the best known private messenger and doesn’t compromise on privacy and security. It’s very simple to use, the setup process is basically the exact same as on WhatsApp or Telegram, it has good clients for every platform and they have operated safely with a great record for over 10 years.
I understand that other solutions might be better in theory, but if we keep suggesting a new obscure and hard to use messenger to noobs, they will never make the switch. In order to get more privacy for ourselves and the (potentially less technical) people we need to communicate with, let’s just get them to use something simple and private like Signal.
Yea, ive gotten pretty wide adoption from friends and family on Signal, but id love to have a comparable product with even more features/security/privacy
Matrix may get there eventually, but for now its Signal.
Agree
When it comes to clients being not fully compatible - I understand where there might be a problem, but I personally never encountered it. Conversations covers Android, and Gajim is on both Windows and Linux. In my experience, they work just fine with each other, and Android+Windows+Linux covers the majority.
I do use Signal with a few people who refused to use XMPP, but I’d disagree they have good clients for every platform. Because the desktop one essentially doesn’t work without a smartphone. Registering in something like Waydroid doesn’t allow binding a desktop client because it wants to scan a QR code, and Signal-Cli just didn’t work with binding a regular client. So I am stuck using the inconvenient Signal-cli, because the only alternative I saw so far would be using it on Waydroid, which is even less convenient. Not to mention that the client itself is on Electron.
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Jami with unifiedPush notifications is a pretty good option
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You mean that XMPP protocol which is not encrypted by default? Oh yes you mean that.
XMPP would need to be redesigned from ground up as a secure and private messaging protocol to be a valid choice.
XMPP has it advantages but to many cry out that it is the savior when it is not. We need something better.
The major clients now do have OMEMO. Yea, I agree it’s flawed but that’s so far it’s the one I settled on. Do you know other, more refined selfhostable solutions? I am now looking for development there but doubt I’d get few people that I already got there to switch again.
Not aware that there is a modern decentralized secure and private chat protocol. Sadly. I also am not aware of any developmenta of something like that, so XMPP is the best we got (for decentralized open widly supported protocols)
I know that a lot of clients do encryption of the message body by default, but it still leaves a lot of stuff in plain text (afaik).
“Here’s what someone who has never created a private messenger thinks about Whatsapp’s privacy.”
Why would anyone care about what he has to say? 💀
Sure, fuck WhatsApp, but Telegram isn’t even end-to-end encrypted most of the time. Their group chats never are, and their “secret chat” encryption for non-group chats must be explicitly enabled and hardly ever is because it disables some features. And when it is encrypted, it’s with some dubious nonstandard cryptography.
It’s also pseudo open source; they do publish source code once in a while but it never corresponds to the binaries that nearly everyone actually uses.
And the audacity to talk about metadata when Telegram accounts still require a phone number today (as they did five years ago when this post was written) is just… 🤯
State-sponsored exploits against WhatsApp might be more common than against Telegram, or at least we hear about them more, but it’s not because the app is more vulnerable: it’s because governments don’t need to compromise the endpoint to read your Telegram messages: they can just add a new device to your account with an SMS and see everything.
(╯° °）╯︵ ┻━┻
Anything claiming to prioritize privacy yet asking for your phone number (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, …) is a farce.
Telegram isn’t perfect, but it is infinitely better than Whatsapp because it doesn’t belong to Facebook, and also isn’t from the United States. Also it can be used by normies without problem, unlike Matrix or Xmpp or what have you.
Bravo, bravo, bravo!!
Dude, see you on the same side of the barricades when the time comes to fight the centralized army of agent Smiths 👏👏👏
Then what is the choice?
Simplex - requires nothing, just install. But you connect with other people by sending a code outside of SimpleX. Though they’ve added a directory service for groups.
XMPP
Wire (not Wiremin), though it requires an email account, which is easily addressed with a disposable email.
Signal is very secure from what I’ve read, despite the phone number identifier.
WhatsApp’s e2e encryption is based on the Signal protocol and active by default. Telegram’s is opt-in. So much for Telegram’s superior privacy…
No. Whatsapp’s metadata is not encrypted and can be used by its parent company, also backups are not secure. While telegram’s is opt in (yeah that sucks and here’s there excuse for that https://tsf.telegram.org/manuals/e2ee-simple), they are as secure as signal’s (if not more).
Multi-device End-to-end encrypted chats are a mess
I’m not going to read it all but matrix managed to deliver on fully encrypted messages that you can have on multiple devices.
×Years ago*.
Kills me I was running XMPP on my phone in 2010. Couldn’t get people off SMS to XMPP, though it synced with my desktop messenger even then! Yea, encryption hadn’t been fully sorted yet, but it’s not like SMS has encryption!
I’m not saying that WhatsApp is the good guy here, Meta sucks but compared to Telegram I rather trust them if I have to.
And the unencrypted backups are only problematic when you use the automatic Google Drive upload.WHY?
Telegram is a shell company and only offers mediocre, opt-in encryption. The thing I like most about them is their support for 3rd party clients.
I have to use their service for some contacts same as with WhatsApp but I would prefer more secure and privacy friendly alternatives.You obviously haven’t seen the charts of the metadata that WhatsApp collects. And we know how anti-consuner, adversarial and anti-privacy Facebook is overall with their tracking pixels, ghost profiles, etc.
Telegram at least doesn’t have the FB dataset. FB knows about me, though I’ve never once in my life been on their website or used anything related to them. Not once. The first I heard of FB I saw immediately the privacy problem with them, and made sure to never have anything to do with them. But they know about me from other peoe posting pics and such, which they then correlate with sites I’ve been on that have tracking pixels. WhatsApp ads a metric shitton of metadata to that pile, with date, time, location, duration of conversations, businesses you’re near at the time, their operating hours, etc, etc. They have a massive, constantly growing dataset, which they can easily correlate elements.
WhatsApp may be encrypted, but I trust Zuck so little that I wouldn’t doubt they capture keystrokes in app before the message is sent. They have the capability as was shown in a recent research article (though no evidence of it happening).
Id rather not use Telegram, but it’s far lesser of the two evils. I’m trying to get folks to other apps. Signal doesn’t sell, SimpleX isn’t quite ready, I think Wire has the same stored encryption key issue, though I may be mistaken (I’m not fully clear how it’s managed).
Durov is a suspicious RuSSian who very likely works for FSB. Do not use Telegram at all costs!
Crazy racism
Where is racism there? I’m Russian myself and I know what I’m saying.
Ok, use Telegram, then don’t cry when they leak your data
Yeah you clearly are a russian and you clearly know what you are saying by those intentional caps.
Haven’t you heard anything about the war with Ukraine?
