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Guess that confirms that E2EE is effective against these backdoors.
We’ve long had NSA slides that showed Tor and e2ee solutions as “disastrous” to their visibility.
deleted by creator
You & others might be interested in this:
https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/library/field-stripping-a-weapons-system-building-a-trustworthy-computer-video/
and maybe this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_EngineDo what the Germans did in ww1 when they knew their diplomatic code was broken but couldn’t change it. They put the important stuff in plain sight and treated it like junk mail and encoded the boring stuff.
There’s really no law against using geofencing, just laws allowing admissability. Have a 2nd phone without a SIM and use it at hotspots for encrypted stuff, leave the main one at home if you’re feeling fat and sassy
I’m just saying that, unless you built the device you’re using, and you know what every component does, and you know what it’s doing when, and you know it wasn’t manufactured by a foreign state-owned manufacturer with a penchant for putting spy chips in their devices, then you can’t truly trust anything you do on it, encrypted or not. It doesn’t really matter if the software is being encrypted by backdoored hardware.
Yeah, we’re in agreement, but also, if any device can be traced back to you in any way (ie: cell phone bill), it’s 100% sus, regardless of what you have installed or what preventative measures you’ve taken. If you ping some towers there’s a non-zero chance someone notices, and you’d be better off not having some easily-tracked signature behind it.
It’s basically just an addendum, leave all personal devices at home when doing anything remotely sketchy, or for the sake of privacy, but a burner phone off ebay with no sim in airplane mode is about as hard to track as anything
Oh yeah for sure. Gang gang.
The same people who want to get rid of encryption
From RFC 2804:
- The IETF believes that adding a requirement for wiretapping will make affected protocol designs considerably more complex. Experience has shown that complexity almost inevitably jeopardizes the security of communications even when it is not being tapped by any legal means; there are also obvious risks raised by having to protect the access to the wiretap. This is in conflict with the goal of freedom from security loopholes.
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc2804/
This was written in 2000 in response to US government requests to add backdoors to voice-over-IP (VoIP) standards.
It was recognized 25 years ago that having tapping capabilities is fundamentally insecure.
It was always recognized.
Every time I go to the Interwebs and read what people have to say on security, it’s always the same high horse absolutism.
I’ve read Attwood’s book on Asperger’s syndrome a couple weeks ago. There such absolutism was mentioned as a natural trait of aspies, but one that, when applied to social power dynamics or any military logic, gets you assroped in jail.
People who want to spy on you or read all your communications understand too that general security suffers, but just not having that power is out of question for them, and also with the power they already have the security effect on them personally won’t be too big.
It’s a social problem of the concept of personal freedom being vilified in the Western world via association with organized crime, terrorism, anarchism, you get the idea.
It’s not hard to see that the pattern here is that these things are chosen because they challenge state’s authority and power, because, well, subsets of what’s called organized crime and terrorism that can be prevented by surveillance are not what people generally consider bad, and anarchism is not something bad in any form.
What’s more important, people called that do not need to challenge the state if the state is functional, as in - representative, not oppressive and not a tool for some groups to hurt other groups.
As we’ve seen in all the world history, what’s called organized crime and what’s called terrorism are necessary sometimes to resolve deadlocks in a society. It has never happened in history that a society could function by its formalized laws for long without breaking consistency of those. And it has never happened that an oppressed group\ideology\movement would be able to make its case in accordance with the laws made by its oppressor.
Why I’m typing all this - it’s not a technical problem. It’s a problem of bad people who should be afraid not being afraid and thus acting, and good people who should be afraid not being afraid and thus not acting.
You don’t need technical knowledge to see the problem.
If you live in an apartment and your landlord has a master key, then all an attacker needs to do is get that master key. In an apartment complex, maybe that’s okay because who’s going to break in to the landlord’s office? But on the internet, tons of people are trying to break in every day, and eventually someone will get the key.
Even for the landlord, I’d rather them have a copy of my key than a master key, because that way they’d need to steal my key specifically.
And I had one experience where our landlords attempted to rob us.
Sounds bad I guess, but the USA has been spying on us for a long time now. Is the bad part that it’s China?
When a whole nation’s communications are intercepted by another entity, yes, the bad part is that it’s another nation. Especially an adversarial one.
This is not about individuals’ personal privacy. It’s about things that happen at a much larger scale. For example, leverage for political influence, or leaking of sensitive info that sometimes finds its way into unsecured channels. Mass surveillance is powerful.
Bets on this being directly related to back doors that US spy agencies demand be installed?
RTFA
The third has been systems that telecommunications companies use in compliance with the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), which allows law enforcement and intelligence agencies with court orders to track individuals’ communications. CALEA systems can include classified court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which processes some U.S. intelligence court orders.
So, bet won?
Wouldn’t surprise me. “We’re doing this to be helpful to you!” is actually moustached disney villain behavior.
^ similar to the prisoners with cats gimmick. “look how nice we’re being to our prisoners” is actually “stop yelling at your bunkmate or we’ll take away your cat”
Yes. Wars happen. Even corrupt politicians are nicer when their control base is inside the country.
FBI: Here’s some communications security tips from the Sureños: tell someone you’ll meet them and leave your phone in a nightstand
Like Signal?
No, BPs are a risk. Better to avoid apps that require phone numbers
Yes, like Signal!
Which does not only use end-to-end encryption for communication, but protects meta data as well:Signal also uses our metadata encryption technology to protect intimate information about who is communicating with whom—we don’t know who is sending you messages, and we don’t have access to your address book or profile information. We believe that the inability to monetize encrypted data is one of the reasons that strong end-to-end encryption technology has not been widely deployed across the commercial tech industry.
Source: https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/
I haven’t verified that claim investigating the source code, but I’m positive others have.
Or alternatively, Molly
I read Molly is forked from Signal. Can I message Signal users from Molly, or do all parties need Molly?
Molly connects to Signal’s servers, so you can chat with your Signal contacts seamlessly.
From my experience parties are always better with Molly
What i read [and corrected] from the article :
“The hacking
campaign[group], nicknamed [ by Microsoft ] Salt Typhoonby Microsoft,
[ this actual campaign of attacks ] is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and not yet fully remediated. Officials in a press call Tuesday [ 2024-12-3 ] refused to set a timetable for declaring the country’s telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had previously told NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers.”Thanks I thought from reading this maybe Salt Typhoon was the codename for the next version of windows.
No, that’s Salty AI
Oh gee, forcing companies to leave backdoors for the government might compromise security, everyone. Who’d have thunk it? 🤦
They knew, they were putting backdoors when they needed them.
Now the new administration will take half of the blame in public opinion (that’s how this works) and also half of the profits, so they won’t investigate too strictly those who’ve done such things.
But also words don’t cost anything. They can afford to say the obvious after the deed has been done.
It’s probably also good practice to assume that not all encrypted apps are created equal, too. Google’s RCS messaging, for example, says “end-to-end encrypted”, which sounds like it would be a direct and equal competitor to something like Signal. But Google regularly makes money off of your personal data. It does not behoove a company like Google to protect your data.
Start assuming every corporation is evil. At worst you lose some time getting educated on options.
RCS is an industry standard, not a Google thing.
End to end is end to end. Its either “the devices sign the messages with keys that never leave the the device so no 3rd party can ever compromise them” or it’s not.
Signal is a more trustworthy org, but google isn’t going to fuck around with this service to make money. They make their money off you by keeping you in the google ecosystem and data harvesting elsewhere.
End to end matters, who has the key; you or the provider. And Google could still read your messages before they are encrypted.
You have the key, not the provider. They are explicit about this in the implementation.
They can only read the messages before encryption if they are backdooring all android phones in an act of global sabotage. Pretty high consequences for soke low stakes data.
Yup, they can read anything you can, and send whatever part they want through Google Play services. I don’t trust them, so I don’t use Messenger or Play services on my GrapheneOS device.
Of course our app is end-to-end encrypted! The ends being your device and our server, that is.
It’s end to end to end encrypted!
That’s literally what zoom said early in the pandemic.
Then all the business world gave them truck loads of money, the industry called them out on it, and they hired teams of cryptographers to build an actual e2ee system
Signal doesn’t harvest, use, sell meta data, Google may do that.
E2E encryption doesn’t protect from that.
Signal is orders of magnitude more trustworthy than Google in that regard.There’s also Session, a fork of Signal which claims that their decentralised protocol makes it impossible/very difficult for them to harvest metadata, even if they wanted to.Tho I personally can’t vouch for how accurate their claims are.
Agreed. That still doesnt mean google is not doing E2EE for its RCS service.
Im not arguing Google is trustworthy or better than Signal. I’m arguing that E2EE has a specific meaning that most people in this thread do not appear to understand.
google isn’t going to fuck around with this service to make money
Your honor, I would like to submit Exhibit A, Google Chrome “Enhanced Privacy”.
Google will absolutely fuck with anything that makes them money.
Thats a different tech. End to end is cut and dry how it works. If you do anything to data mine it, it’s not end to end anymore.
Only the users involved in end to end can access the data in that chat. Everyone else sees encrypted data, i.e noise. If there are any backdoors or any methods to pull data out, you can’t bill it as end to end.
They can just claim archived or deleted messages don’t qualify for end to end encryption in their privacy policy or something equally vague. If they invent their own program they can invent the loophole on how the data is processed
The messages are signed by cryptographic keys on the users phones that never leave the device. They are not decryptable in any way by google or anyone else. Thats the very nature of E2EE.
How end-to-end encryption works
When you use the Google Messages app to send end-to-end encrypted messages, all chats, including their text and any files or media, are encrypted as the data travels between devices. Encryption converts data into scrambled text. The unreadable text can only be decoded with a secret key.
The secret key is a number that’s:
Created on your device and the device you message. It exists only on these two devices.
Not shared with Google, anyone else, or other devices.
Generated again for each message.
Deleted from the sender’s device when the encrypted message is created, and deleted from the receiver’s device when the message is decrypted.
Neither Google or other third parties can read end-to-end encrypted messages because they don’t have the key.
They cant fuck with it, at all, by design. That’s the whole point. Even if they created “archived” messages to datamine, all they would have is the noise.
Exactly. We know corporations regularly use marketing and doublespeak to avoid the fact that they operate for their interests and their interests alone. Again, the interests of corporations are not altruistic, regardless of the imahe they may want to support.
Why should we trust them to “innovate” without independent audit?
Or the content is encrypted, but the metadata isn’t, so they can market to you based on who you talk to and what they buy, etc.
This part is likely, but not what we are talking about. Who you know and how you interact with them is separate from the fact that the content of the messages is not decryptable by anyone but the participants, by design. There is no “quasi” end to end. Its an either/or situation.
It doesn’t matter if the content is encrypted in transit if Google can access the content in the app after decryption. That doesn’t violate E2EE, and they could easily exfiltrate the data though Google Play Services, which is a hard requirement.
I don’t trust them until the app is FOSS, doesn’t rely on Google Play Services, and is independently verified to not send data or metadata to their servers. Until then, I won’t use it.
You are suggesting that “end-to-end” is some kind of legally codified phrase. It just isn’t. If Google were to steal data from a system claiming to be end-to-end encrypted, no one would be surprised.
I think your point is: if that were the case, the messages wouldn’t have been end-to-end encrypted, by definition. Which is fine. I’m saying we shouldn’t trust a giant corporation making money off of selling personal data that it actually is end-to-end encrypted.
By the same token, don’t trust Microsoft when they say Windows is secure.
Its a specific, technical phrase that means one thing only, and yes, googles RCS meets that standard:
https://support.google.com/messages/answer/10262381?hl=en
How end-to-end encryption works
When you use the Google Messages app to send end-to-end encrypted messages, all chats, including their text and any files or media, are encrypted as the data travels between devices. Encryption converts data into scrambled text. The unreadable text can only be decoded with a secret key.
The secret key is a number that’s:
Created on your device and the device you message. It exists only on these two devices.
Not shared with Google, anyone else, or other devices.
Generated again for each message.
Deleted from the sender’s device when the encrypted message is created, and deleted from the receiver’s device when the message is decrypted.
Neither Google or other third parties can read end-to-end encrypted messages because they don’t have the key.
They have more technical information here if you want to deep dive about the literal implementation.
You shouldn’t trust any corporation, but needless FUD detracts from their actual issues.
Even if we assume they don’t have a backdoor (which is probably accurate), they can still exfiltrate any data they want through Google Play services after it’s decrypted.
They’re an ad company, so they have a vested interest in doing that. So I don’t trust them. If they make it FOSS and not rely on Google Play services, I might trust them, but I’d probably use a fork instead.
You are missing my point.
I don’t deny the definition of E2EE. What I question is whether or not RCS does in fact meet the standard.
You provided a link from Google itself as verification. That is… not useful.
Has there been an independent audit on RCS? Why or why not?
Not that I can find.
Can you post Signals most recent independent audit?
This. Distrust in corporations is healthy regardless of what they claim.
Dont trust. Verify. Definitely dont touch it if its closed source
Unless you’re Zoom and just blatantly lie lol
end to end is meaningless when the app scans your content and does whatever with it
For example, WhatsApp and their almost-mandatory “backup” feature.
You may be right for that particular instance, but I’d still argue caution is safer.
End to end could still - especially with a company like Google - include data collection on the device. They could even “end to end” encrypt sending it to Google in the side channel. If you want to be generous, they would perform the aggregation in-device and don’t track the content verbatim, but the point stands: e2e is no guarantee of privacy. You have to also trust that the app itself isn’t recording metrics, and I absolutely do not trust Google to not do this.
They make so of their big money from profiling and ads. No way they’re not going to collect analytics. Heck, if you use the stock keyboard, that’s collecting analytics about the texts you’re typing into Signal, much less Google’s RCS.
They do encrypt it and they likely dont send the messages unencrypted.
Likely what’s happening is they’re extracting keywords to determine what you’re talking about (namely what products you might buy) on the device itself, and then uploading those categories (again, encrypted) up to their servers for storing and selling.
This doesn’t invalidate their claim of e2ee and still lets them profit off of your data. If you want to avoid this, only install apps with open source clients.
E2EE means a 3rd party cant extract anything in the messages at all, by definition.
If they are doing the above, it’s not E2EE, and they are liable for massive legal damages.
Thats not what it means. It means that a third party cannot decrypt it on their servers.
Of course if the “third party” is actually decrypting it on your device, then they can read the messages. I dont know why this is not clear to you.
Note that it doesn’t mean metadata is encrypted. They may not know what you sent, but they may very well know you message your mum twice a day and who your close friends are that you message often, that kinda stuff. There’s a good bit you can do with metadata about messages combined with the data they gather through other services.
It could be end to end encrypted and safe on the network, but if Google is in charge of the device, what’s to say they’re not reading the message after it’s unencrypted? To be fair this would compromise signal or any other app on Android as well
That’s a different threat model that verges on “most astonishing corporate espinoage in human history and greatest threat to corporate personhood” possible for Google. It would require thousands if not tens of thousands of Google employees coordinating in utter secrecy to commit an unheard of crime that would be punishable by death in many circumstances.
If they have backdoored all android phones and are actively exploting them in nefarious ways not explained in their various TOS, then they are exposing themselves to ungodly amounts of legal and regulatory risks.
I expect no board of directors wants a trillion dollars of company worth to evaporate overnight, and would likely not be okay backdooring literally billions of phones from just a fiduciary standpoint.
How do spyware services used by nation-state customers, like Pegasus, work?
They use backdoors in commonly used platforms on an industrial scale.
Maybe some of them are vulnerabilities due to honest mistakes, the problem is - the majority of vulnerabilities due to honest mistakes also carry denial of service risks in widespread usage. Which means they get found quickly enough.
So your stance is that Google is applying self designed malware to its own services to violate its own policies to harvest data that could bring intense legal, financial and reputational harm to it as an org it was ever discovered?
Seems far fetched.
Legal and financial - doubt it. Reputational - counter-propaganda is a thing.
I think your worldview lags behind our current reality. I mean, even in 30-years old reality it would seem a bit naive.
Also you’ve ignored me mentioning things like Pegasus, from our current, not hypothetical, reality.
So yes.
You think a nearly trillion dollar public company has an internal division that writes malware against flaws in its own software in order to harvest data from its own apps. It does this to gain just a bit more data about people it already has a lot of data on, because why not purposely leave active zero days in your own software, right?
That is wildly conspiratorial thinking, and honestly plain FUD. It undermines serious, actual privacy issues the company has when you make up wild cabals that are running double secret malware attacks against themselves inside Google.
It would require thousands if not tens of thousands of Google semployees coordinating in utter secrecy
This is usually used for things like the Moon Landing, where so many folks worked for NASA to make it entirely impossible that the landing was faked.
But it doesn’t really apply here. We know for example that NSA backdoors exist in Windows. Were those a concerted effort by MS employees? Does everyone working on the project have access to every part of the code?
It just isn’t how development works at this scale.
This is usually used for things like the Moon Landing, where so many folks worked for NASA to make it entirely impossible that the landing was faked.
I think it’s also confirmed by radio transmissions from the Moon received in real time right then by USSR and other countries.
Ok but no one is arguing Windows is encrypted. Google is specifically stating, in a way that could get them sued for shitloads of money, that their messaging protocol is E2EE. They have explicitly described how it is E2EE. Google can be a bad company while still doing this thing within the bounds we all understand. For example, just because the chat can’t be backdoored doesn’t mean the device can’t be.
Telegram has its supposedly E2EE protocol which isn’t used by most of Telegram users, but also there have been a few questionable traits found in it.
Google is trusted a bit more than Pavel Durov, but it can well do a similar thing.
And yes, Android is a much larger heap of hay where they can hide a needle.
End-to-end encryption matters if your device isn’t actively trying to sabotage your privacy.
If you run Android, Google is guilty of that.
If you run Windows in a non-enterprise environment Microsoft is guilty of that.
If you run iOS or MacOS, Apple is (very likely) guilty of that.
Well yeah, to use RCS on Android, you need to use Google’s Messenger app, so they can absolutely still get your data. Source from GrapheneOS.
I don’t use RCS because I refuse to use Google’s Messenger app. Simple as.
If its not Open Source and Audited yearly, its compromised. Your best option for secure comms is Signal and Matrix.
Interpretation - the NSA can now crack all common encryption methods, so let’s disadvantage our adversaries at no real cost to us.
I vaguely recall Bruce Schneier saying that there is good evidence that the NSA cannot crack certain encryption methods. At the time, RSA was on the list. Maybe common methods mean roll-your-own corporate encryption, but it’s my understanding that GNUpg and similar software are safe.
The US gov should provide us with their own encryption app to protect us and just have a backdoor only they can access so they can keep an eye on any baddies! #Igotnothingtohide #amiright #muricafuckyeah
Poe’s law?
Coles law
Everybodies aunt at thanksgiving:
“I should be fine. I only trust the facebook with my information. Oh, did I tell you? We have 33 more cousins we didn’t know about. I found out on 23andme.com. All of them want to borrow money.”
End-to-end encryption is indispensable. Our legislators (no matter where we live) need to be made to understand this next time they try to outlaw it.
“So it’s like a filter on the tubes?” - Our legislators
“you wouldn’t put a dump truck full of movies on a snowy road without chains on the tires would you?”
I’m a cryptographer in Florida, and now I’m more confused
Ew.
Think of it like this:
- no encryption - sending a postcard
- client to sever encryption - dropping off the postcard at the post office instead of the mailbox
- end to end encryption - security envelope in the mailbox
- read receipts - registered mail
Hopefully you’re less wrong now Mr/Mrs legislator.
“I didn’t have my pills today. Can you explain that to my staffer? They’ll make a note of it.”
Hey you guys remember that big AT&T breach recently?
