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-2 points

I would never risk any third party messaging service in military or critical state matters. It’s just common sense, even for a layman. Everything is compromised, Telegram is, Whatsapp is, Signal is, all of them are.

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22 points

How is Signal compromised?

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16 points
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It’s not, unless they’re some sort of cryptography expert with a peer-reviewed white paper pending publication. The Signal protocol (GPLv3) is extremely robust and has almost no capacity for metadata generation, and both the app and server-side code are under the AGPLv3 (technically if they were compromised they could use different, unaudited server-side code, but refer back to “basically no metadata”). Signal has essentially no capacity to be compromised; they can’t even bait and switch users with a pre-compiled app whose source code isn’t the publicly available one and actually has a backdoor because their builds are reproducible and it would be caught immediately.

Maybe they take issue with the crypto bullshit, which is valid but doesn’t compromise messaging security. Maybe they don’t like that they took away SMS, which I completely agree with, but also actually makes it marginally more secure. Either way, I seriously doubt if they had any mathematical insight into Signal being “compromised” that they would be here hanging around on Lemmy right now.

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7 points

Be that as it may, it’s still an incredibly short sighted decision to use a centralized service that is under 3rd party control for real security sensitive applications.

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2 points

Matrix chat is not :)

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0 points

I would never risk any third party messaging service in military or critical state matters.

Ah, so mister genius would write his own, have I heard that right? Would he use XOR twice when encrypting a message, just to be double safe?

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1 point

How secure something is an spectrum. Sure self hosted matrix is a lot safer than sending your messages through meta servers for example. It’s about what is the threat levels of what one is doing. Total tinfoiling like writing your own quantum proof multi encryption ciphers and sending that over an tamper proof usb stick with self destruct mechanism by a carrier pridgeon is not necessary or practical for average people who just want privacy, but for critical government applications and especially the military it might be. That is what we are talking about here.

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1 point

Sure self hosted matrix is a lot safer than sending your messages through meta servers for example.

A lot safer in which case? I can imagine a few very real ones where it’s not.

Self-hosted Signal (requires patching the client, but it’s straightforward) server I would understand.

but for critical government applications and especially the military it might be. That is what we are talking about here.

Signal devs have a few papers describing how and by what logic they are addressing these problems.

Again, self-hosting (because accounts can be blocked by Signal) their solution is a better idea.

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