Meredith Whittaker reaffirms that Signal would leave UK if forced by privacy bill::Meredith Whittaker, the president of the Signal Foundation, the organization that maintains the Signal messaging app, spoke about the U.K.'s controversial new privacy bill at TC Disrupt 2023.
What are the governments around the world afraid of? Always so quick to go for overly invasive privacy laws. They should be afraid of the citizens, not the other war around.
They are afraid of the citizens, that’s why they want to be able to read all the messages.
I think they’re saying that they are supposed to be (i.e., this doesn’t need fixing). If they “fix” it, the people will be afraid of the government.
This is why I use, support, and promote the Signal Foundation. Thanks for what you do!
Let the UK come up with their own back door apps.
People vaguely disparage signal on social media a lot, what’s the evidence for signal having a backdoor?
The fact that they store encryption keys on their servers in the cloud, relying on SGX lock boxes to prevent trivial exploitation of those keys.
In information security, as with intelligence work, it’s about capabilities not intent.
Signal has the capability, to brute force the SGX enclosures, or even use trivial code signed by Intel to simply export the keys from SGX enclosures, which means all of the encryption keys stored in signals cloud, which is all of them, could be compromised. That is a capability they have.
SGX has had multiple exploits, especially side channel attacks through timing, and other metadata in the CPU. Intel is a US corporation, and their subject to national security letters, so they could be compelled to release their SGX signing keys…
All the Lego pieces are there for signal to have a back door. It’s about capabilities. I’m not saying they have a back door, but the pieces are there for one.
If you recall a few years ago, there’s a big hullabaloo about signal storing encryption keys in the cloud behind four digit pins… this is why people are so angry about it. It means we have to trust the central servers, which is antithetical to the capability model that we talked about.
That being said we are reasonably sure the signal client code is secure. So if you disable pin codes and signal, your encryption key is still sent to signal cloud, but it is signed with a cryptographically secure 128-bit something code. So that’s fine. But if everybody you’re talking to hasn’t disabled the pin, then the other side of your conversation is still exploitable.
TLDR: signals great if your threat model does not include five eyes intelligence services, and if your threat model does include five eyes intelligence services you should use something else. Not by intent, but by capabilities.
Thanks very much for the breakdown. I was totally unaware of the keys being stored in the cloud, that seems like a terrible idea for a privacy based messaging system.
Are there more secure alternatives?
Matrix has absolute shit adoption, but is open source and pretty secure. Then there is always Telegram.
Do you still have to consciously enable encryption in Telegram? That was the gripe people had with it for a while. Chats weren’t encrypted by default.
Yes, you still do for E2EE.
Okay cool. Thanks. Oh I didn’t even know telegram had encryption capability
Almost every chat platform uses encryption by default, including telegram. If you are talking about E2EE, you have to enable that manually for each chat.
Matrix is really awesome and I hope it becomes the gold standard. However, if I were a Snowden, I would pick signal over matrix for the simple reason that signal doesn’t store your conversations on the server. Matrix does. Those conversations are encrypted client side with a key the server doesn’t have, but they are still stored centrally. That has advantages and disadvantages. It is much better for usability, because you can log in from any device and you see all of your conversations in one place. Unlike signal, there are no primary and linked devices, you can run matrix on desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or straight from a web browser. When logging in from a new device, you need your username, password, and to either authenticate the session from another device, or manually put in your encryption key to decode the chats. That also means there is no need for backup or restore of anything other than your encryption key. For that reason, I am more frequently pushing people to install matrix than signal these days.
However if security is more important than usability, signal wins, if only because there is never a question of storing anything on any server. Start a chat with somebody, make the messages disappearing, and you can be pretty sure that as long as neither of your devices are captured while the chat is in progress it will never be seen by anybody.
This breakdown makes me much more hesitant to ever use Signal over Matrix. Signal is storing the keys themselves, where as Matrix is storing messages that can’t be decrypted and no keys. If the keys on Signal’s servers are ever stolen, you can kiss all of your message privacy goodbye. If a Matrix server is hacked, the user can’t do anything with the messages because they’re encrypted and no keys are stored.
You also have the option to host your own Matrix server and have more control—something that is not an option with Signal.
Yes. But signal is the gold standard, it’s going to be hard to get your contacts onto any other platform.
https://www.privacyguides.org/en/real-time-communication/
Reviews the options nicely, I use briar, it’s rough around the edges. But it does the job.
I’ve been meaning to try simple x, but I haven’t given it a go yet.
You can follow the privacy guides guide on hardening signal, it’s useful. Net net the easiest thing to do is disable your PIN, and ask any friends you’re speaking with to disable their PIN.
https://blog.privacyguides.org/2022/07/07/signal-configuration-and-hardening/#signal-pin
Simplex is working pretty well for me. One of the people I chat with has an apple device so briar wasn’t an option, otherwise that’s probably what we would be using.
Okay, thanks. I’ll read both of those articles and for now disable my pin on signal and talk to my contacts.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Online Safety Bill, which was passed into law in September, includes a clause — clause 122 — that, depending on how it’s interpreted, could allow the U.K.’s communications regulator, Ofcom, to break the encryption of apps and services under the guise of making sure illegal material such as child sexual exploitation and abuse content is removed.
Whittaker didn’t mince words in airing her fears about the Online Safety Bill’s implications.
“We’re really worried about people in the U.K. who would live under a surveillance regime like the one that seems to be teased by the Home Office and others in the U.K.”
Whittaker noted that Signal takes a number of steps to ensure its users remain anonymous regardless of the laws and regulations in their particular country.
Asked onstage what data Signal’s handed over in the instances that it’s received search warrants, Whittaker said that it’s been limited to the phone number registered to a Signal account and the last time a user accessed their account.
She pointed to reasons for optimism, like Meta planning to roll out end-to-end encryption on Facebook Messenger and Instagram in spite of the U.K.’s Online Safety Bill.
The original article contains 506 words, the summary contains 194 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Good on signal. There is no middle ground with fully blow surveillance states as dark as the UK.
My one wonder is, what would banks use to securely provide access to their customers online? What about online stores for local small, medium, and large businesses? Or is this going to knly target messaging and social networks?
My one wonder is, what would banks use to securely provide access to their customers online?
Considering that it would be illegal for banks to securely provide access to their customers online the answer is simple: they wouldn’t.
I see, so this is a blanket ban then.
Given that the UK’s tech industry is strongly tied to Fintech, and without it utterly crumbles into becoming cheap support for the US, I hope there is some serious clapback from the likes of Monzo, Starling, and co.
Meredith Whitaker is good to make this clear. That whole system in UK seems bizarre to me.
PS, Use Signal.
I was kind of worried that India did not ban signal when they banned all the end-to-end encrypted chat applications.
If the UK follow the same path, namely signal is exempted, that would be a strong indication that signal is compromised at the nation state level at the very least.
Update: what’s with all the down votes? I’m a signal cheerleader, this is a test of signal, we’ll see how they react, how the ecosystem reacts. It’s curious. We should pay attention. That’s all I’m saying
Didn’t Signal make the same statement for India?
I don’t recall. I just know India did not ban signal. But they banned all the other end and encrypted apps I use. So it’s very curious.
One of my colleagues said, and a very reasonable and intelligent colleague at that, if you were going to design a global intelligence honey pot for encrypted messaging, signals how you would do it.
I’m not saying they are, but they have the capability to, structurally their ideal for honeypot. The fact that India didn’t ban them, that’s a data point…
I still use signal, on the balance of probabilities it’s still the best platform for a general end to end encryption, but nothing is forever so I keep my options open
I’m curious how such a ban works. Of course they’ll tell Google and Apple to stop distributing the apps, but can’t you just sideload the app? Or are they blocking some network connections at the country level, or filtering DNS?
It could get really interesting. Delisting from the app store would probably cover 90% of users.
People could still sideload, or use fdroid or VPNs.
If the UK got aggressive with internet filtering and blocked signals endpoints, signal proxies exist. But they would be slower for day-to-day use. Just like signal does for Iran.
We might see a resurgence of domain front running, which I believe cloudflare and AWS had harsh words for signal when they used it before. But if it’s the only option.
The internet will find a way to route basically. I have full faith in that
There’s a difference between the spooks being able to read everyone’s messages and the ordinary police being able to do so. Assuming that Five Eyes or similar have a secret way of decrypting Signal messages, it won’t remain a secret if every drug dealer who uses Signal is swiftly arrested. (Even with the trick of parallel construction, postal inspectors magically getting lucky every time someone uses Signal would get suspicious pretty quickly.) If the spooks can read your Signal messages, they are compelled to ration that capability rather than burning it.
Agreed 100%. So I think signal matches most people’s threat models, so it’s still great to recommend to people.
If you were running some countries internal messaging service for diplomats. You might use signal, but you’d have to mirror the infrastructure to completely host it. And then probably add your own ciphers on top.
All down to the threat model.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that. It could also be that they attempt to block the rise of new platforms, and by doing so limiting the amount of platforms that they have to compromise.
