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mjg59Moxie, the lead developer of the Signal secure communication application, recently blogged on the tradeoffs between providing a supportable federated service and providing a compelling application that gains significant adoption. There's a set of perfectly reasonable arguments around that that I don't want to rehash - regardless of feelings on the benefits of federation in general, there's certainly an increase in engineering cost in providing a stable intra-server protocol that still allows for addition of new features, and the person leading a project gets to make the decision about whether that's a valid tradeoff.
One voiced complaint about Signal on Android is the fact that it depends on the Google Play Services. These are a collection of proprietary functions for integrating with Google-provided services, and Signal depends on them to provide a good out of band notification protocol to allow Signal to be notified when new messages arrive, even if the phone is otherwise in a power saving state. At the time this decision was made, there were no terribly good alternatives for Android. Even now, nobody's really demonstrated a free implementation that supports several million clients and has no negative impact on battery life, so if your aim is to write a secure messaging client that will be adopted by as many people is possible, keeping this dependency is entirely rational.
On the other hand, there are users for whom the decision not to install a Google root of trust on their phone is also entirely rational. I have no especially good reason to believe that Google will ever want to do something inappropriate with my phone or data, but it's certainly possible that they'll be compelled to do so against their will. The set of people who will ever actually face this problem is probably small, but it's probably also the set of people who benefit most from Signal in the first place.
(Even ignoring the dependency on Play Services, people may not find the official client sufficient - it's very difficult to write a single piece of software that satisfies all users, whether that be down to accessibility requirements, OS support or whatever. Slack may be great, but there's still people who choose to use Hipchat)
This shouldn't be a problem. Signal is free software and anybody is free to modify it in any way they want to fit their needs, and as long as they don't break the protocol code in the process it'll carry on working with the existing Signal servers and allow communication with people who run the official client. Unfortunately, Moxie has indicated that he is not happy with forked versions of Signal using the official servers. Since Signal doesn't support federation, that means that users of forked versions will be unable to communicate with users of the official client.
This is awkward. Signal is deservedly popular. It provides strong security without being significantly more complicated than a traditional SMS client. In my social circle there's massively more users of Signal than any other security app. If I transition to a fork of Signal, I'm no longer able to securely communicate with them unless they also install the fork. If the aim is to make secure communication ubiquitous, that's kind of a problem.
Right now the choices I have for communicating with people I know are either convenient and secure but require non-free code (Signal), convenient and free but insecure (SMS) or secure and free but horribly inconvenient (gpg). Is there really no way for us to work as a community to develop something that's all three?
One voiced complaint about Signal on Android is the fact that it depends on the Google Play Services. These are a collection of proprietary functions for integrating with Google-provided services, and Signal depends on them to provide a good out of band notification protocol to allow Signal to be notified when new messages arrive, even if the phone is otherwise in a power saving state. At the time this decision was made, there were no terribly good alternatives for Android. Even now, nobody's really demonstrated a free implementation that supports several million clients and has no negative impact on battery life, so if your aim is to write a secure messaging client that will be adopted by as many people is possible, keeping this dependency is entirely rational.
On the other hand, there are users for whom the decision not to install a Google root of trust on their phone is also entirely rational. I have no especially good reason to believe that Google will ever want to do something inappropriate with my phone or data, but it's certainly possible that they'll be compelled to do so against their will. The set of people who will ever actually face this problem is probably small, but it's probably also the set of people who benefit most from Signal in the first place.
(Even ignoring the dependency on Play Services, people may not find the official client sufficient - it's very difficult to write a single piece of software that satisfies all users, whether that be down to accessibility requirements, OS support or whatever. Slack may be great, but there's still people who choose to use Hipchat)
This shouldn't be a problem. Signal is free software and anybody is free to modify it in any way they want to fit their needs, and as long as they don't break the protocol code in the process it'll carry on working with the existing Signal servers and allow communication with people who run the official client. Unfortunately, Moxie has indicated that he is not happy with forked versions of Signal using the official servers. Since Signal doesn't support federation, that means that users of forked versions will be unable to communicate with users of the official client.
This is awkward. Signal is deservedly popular. It provides strong security without being significantly more complicated than a traditional SMS client. In my social circle there's massively more users of Signal than any other security app. If I transition to a fork of Signal, I'm no longer able to securely communicate with them unless they also install the fork. If the aim is to make secure communication ubiquitous, that's kind of a problem.
Right now the choices I have for communicating with people I know are either convenient and secure but require non-free code (Signal), convenient and free but insecure (SMS) or secure and free but horribly inconvenient (gpg). Is there really no way for us to work as a community to develop something that's all three?
Re: Yes, you can pick all three, and you can do it right now.
Date: 2016-05-12 09:18 pm (UTC)What do you think Telegram? ... I think it would fulfill quite well with many of your expectations. In my case, I made me very similar to yours questions and Signal not meet all I needed.
When I installed Telegram already had several of my contacts in it and now I have the majority. For each individual conversation I use secret chats default and even for groups there is only the possibility of chats in the cloud, do not talk issues of great secret with my teams, I also believe that in the future will be implemented something similar due to changes they have made similar applications.
In my work we use a custom client, but that does not stop to communicate with the official client or other forks available (On Android does not depend on Play Services and is optional). Finally, Telegram privacy policies and encryption system for the cloud chats give me confidence, even more than the service Signal (Metadata, location of the servers, etc.)
Cheers
Re: Yes, you can pick all three, and you can do it right now.
Date: 2016-05-12 09:24 pm (UTC)Re: Yes, you can pick all three, and you can do it right now.
Date: 2016-05-13 01:20 am (UTC)At least I trust the judgment of the Electronic Frontier Foundation to establish a code audit (external reputable company, 12 months old, security structure, etc) and that gives me the confidence to use the service.
Are you referring to other audit?
Source:
https://www.eff.org/node/82654
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/what-makes-good-security-audit
Re: Yes, you can pick all three, and you can do it right now.
Date: 2016-08-28 07:37 pm (UTC)http://cs.au.dk/~jakjak/master-thesis.pdf
The only mentioned issues are way back into its first months of life, or a SHA1 collision problem assuming you had one of those shiny big mining farms.
Afaik since they added two step auth and they upped key size they are good.
Re: Yes, you can pick all three, and you can do it right now.
Date: 2016-05-24 01:16 am (UTC)Re: Yes, you can pick all three, and you can do it right now.
Date: 2016-08-28 07:31 pm (UTC)Thankfully you can enable password auth at any time.
If you are talking about those possible in a reasonable timeframe SH1 collisions based attacks in secure chats, I think that has been fixed this february by upping key size
As per encrypt-then-MAC they have a faq entry that cite "performance reasons", and still no secure compromise.
Reliance on a trusted server (cloud chats) is quite about *convenience* most of people research.