There’s no separate computer, it’s all in the monitor!

No, that’s just an assumption. It’s very standard. But they do, this is the code for it. https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/app/src/main/java/org/conscrypt/ConscryptSignal.java
That doesn’t confirm they send anything extra about your device, that’s an assumption as well.

If I share an IP with 100 million other Signal users

That’s already not very likely, but ignoring IP, you’re the only one with your SSL keys. As part of authentication, you are identified. All the information about your device is transmitted. Then you stop identifying yourself in future messages, but your SSL keys tie your messages together. They are discarded once the message is decrypted by the server, so your messages should in theory be anonymised in the case of a leak to a third party. That seems to be what sealed sender is designed for, but it isn’t what I’m concerned about.

daniel sent a user an image…

Right, but it’s not other users I’m scared of. Signal also has my exit node.

What you’re describing is (not) alarming (…) Signal’s security team wrote.

I mean if strangers can find my city on the secret chat app I find that quite alarming. The example isn’t that coarse, and Signal, being a centralised platform with 100% locked down strict access, they well could defend users against this.

What do you mean when you say “conversation” here?

When their keys are refreshed. I don’t know how often. I meant a conversation as people understand it, not first time contact. My quick internet search says that the maximum age for profile keys is 30 days, but I would imagine in practice it’s more often.

Even if we trust Signal, with Sealed Sender, without any sort of random delay in message delivery, a nation-state level adversary could observe inbound and outbound network activity and derive high confidence information about who’s contacting whom.

That is true, but no reason to cut Signal slack. If either party is in another country or on a VPN, then that’s a mitigating factor against monitoring the whole network. But then if Signal is sharing their data with that adversary, then the VPN or being in a different country factors has been defeated.

Here’s the blog post from 2017

I appreciate the blog post and information. I don’t trust them to only run the published server code. It’s too juicy of an honeypot.

I don’t have any comment on SGX here. It’s one of those things where there’s so many moving parts and so much secret information, and so much you have to understand and trust that it basically becomes impossible to verify or even put trust in someone who claims to have verified it. Sometimes it’s an inappropriate position, but I think it’s fine here: Signal doesn’t offer me anything, I have no reason to put so much effort into understanding what can be verified with SGX.

And thanks for the audits archive.

Okay. But this method doesn’t address that the service doesn’t need the message to include the sender to know who the sender is. The sender ('s unique device) can with 100% accuracy be appended to the message by the server after it’s received. Even if we trust them on the parts that require trust, the setup as described by the blog doesn’t do anything to prevent social graphs from being derived, since the sender is identified at the start of every conversation.

If we trust them not to store any logs (unverifiable), then this method means they can’t precisely know how long a conversation was or how many messages were exchanged. But you can still know precisely when and how many messages both participants received, there’s just a chance that they’re talking to multiple people. Though if we’re trusting them not to store logs (unverifiable), then there shouldn’t be any data to cross reference to begin with. So if we can’t trust them, then why are we trusting them not to take note of the sender?

The upside is that if the message is leaked to a third-party, there’s less info in it now. I’m ignoring the Github link, not because I don’t appreciate you finding it, but because I take the blog-post to be the mission statement for the code, and the blog doesn’t promise a system that comprehensively hides the sender’s identity. I trust their code to do what is described.

I think Dessalines most recent comment is fair even if it’s harsh. You should understand the nature of a “national security letter” to have the context. The vast majority of (USA) government requests are NSLs because they require the least red tape. When you receive one, it’s illegal to disclose that you have, and not to comply. It requires you to share all metadata you have, but they routinely ask for more.

Here’s an article that details the CIA connection https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-after-cia

The concern doesn’t stem from the CIA funding. It’s inherit to all services operating in or hosted in the USA. They should be assumed compromised by default, since the laws of that country require them to be. Therefore, any app you trust has to be completely unable to spy on you. Signal understands this, and uses it in their marketing. But it isn’t true, they’ve made decisions that allow them to spy on you, and ask that you trust them not to. Matrix, XMPP and SimpleX cannot spy on you by design. (It’s possible those apps were made wrong, and therefore allow spying, but that’s a different argument).

How does that work? I wasn’t able to find this. Can you find documentation or code that explains how the client can obscure where it came from?

Yes.

Your client talks to their server, their server talks to your friend’s client. They don’t accept third party apps. The server code is open source, not a secret. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t 99% the open source code, with a few privacy breaking changes. Or that the server software runs exactly as implied, but that that is moot since other software also runs on the same servers and intercepts the data.

We can’t verify that. They have a vested interest in lying, and occasionally are barred from disclosing government requests. However, using this as evidence, as I suggested in my previous comment, we can use it to make informed guesses as to what data they can share. They can’t share the content of the message or calls – This is believable and assumed. But they don’t mention anything surrounding the message, such as whom they sent it to (and it is them who receives and sends the messages), when, how big it was, etc. They say they don’t have access to your contact book – This is also very likely true. But that isn’t the same as not being able to provide a social graph, since they know everyone you’ve spoken to, even if they don’t know what you’ve saved about those people on your device. They also don’t mention anything about the connection they might collect that isn’t directly relevant to providing the service, like device info.

Think about the feasibility of interacting with feds in the manner they imply. No extra communication to explain that they can’t provide info they don’t have? Even though they feel the need to communicate that to their customers. Of course this isn’t the extent of the communication, or they’d be in jail. But they’re comfortable spinning narratives. Consider their whole business is dependant on how they react to these requests. Do you think it’s likely their communication of how they handled it is half-truths?

Used by a bunch of NATO armies isn’t the same as promoted by or made by. It just means they trust Element not to share their secrets. And that blog post is without merit. The author discredits Matrix because it has support for unencrypted messaging. That’s not a negative, it’s just a nice feature for when it’s appropriate. Whereas Signal’s major drawback of requiring your government ID and that you only use their servers is actually grounds to discredit a platform. Your post is the crossed arms furry avatar equivalent of “I drew you as the soyjack”. The article has no substance on the cryptographic integrity of Matrix, because there’s nothing to criticise there.

Sure. You can trust your own fork. Just don’t use the official repos or their servers. The client isn’t where the danger is.

Your link lists all the things they don’t share. The only reasonable reading is that anything not explicitly mentioned is shared. It’s information they have, and they’re legally required to share what they have, also mentioned in your link in the documents underneath their comment.

Your data is routed through Signal servers to establish connections. Signal absolutely can does provide social graphs, message frequency, message times, message size. There’s also nothing stopping them from pushing a snooping build to one user when that user is targeted by the NSA. The specific user would need to check all updates against verified hashes. And if they’re on iOS then that’s not even an option, since the official iOS build hash already doesn’t match the repo.

It’s not my friends I want to hide my number from, it’s Signal.

Signal is USA government approved. Definitely don’t trust it. Use Matrix.

It only knows what you tell it. Just use it like any other website, and follow the same rules you do for all websites, which is to think about what you’re sharing, and only share what you’re okay with them knowing.

Facebook is for local things, so it’ll have to know where you live and who you are. So a VPN is kinda pointless. If you engage with three groups that are in the same village, you’re probably someone from that village, you know.

You also don’t need to clean cookies, because closing the browser clears the cookies, that’s what private browsing is for. But even without private browsing, you should have a global sensible cookie policy that only accepted cookies from whitelisted sites, and for those sites, doesn’t allow them to see cookies they didn’t give you.

On the last point: The most sensible and important thing to worry about here is fingerprinting. Using a different device for every service is an effective way to combat that. It’s not very practical, but specifically using your work phone that you use for other local services, to me makes a lot of sense.

There’s an ongoing genocide and nobody is fighting it or even condemning it, bar a few weak powers like Yemen, DPRK, South Africa.

The EU countries had a chance to cleanly decouple from the USA and mostly continue being neocolonialist and subsidised in the same ways, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Probably could’ve corrected it with the correct diplomacy or just looking the other way. Now the integration with the USA has been strengthened and all the messaging needs to be slowly undone and pivoted if we don’t want to sink together. And even then no one will be able to trust us. Trust matters more for financial and service industries than it does for manufacturing economies.

Maybe USA in their stupidity will try to cut us loose, and we can be forced into a miraculous late pivot just in time. Israel’s genocide crusade was a perfect excuse to aggressively decouple, since by Oct 2023 it was obvious USA lost. But we didn’t take it, getting to be Nazi’s again was too nice a treat I guess. So it’s perfectly possible USA starts exploiting us worse, and we just decide to cope with a lowered vassal tier status rather than actually clawing back some sovereignty. And the obvious result of that of course is more allies and members will want their own sovereignty enforced, and will break with or be pushed out of the EU-unity, which will make the remaining partners even weaker.

The user’s library of apps are Windows apps. And Windows does support Linux programs. There are versions of Windows that don’t technically have it enabled by default, but it’s easy to install support. It has a built in command “wsl --install”, and a button in the store and start-menu. And for most users who get a pre-configured image from IT or their laptop manufacturer it’s pre-installed.

I really don’t get this community’s insistence on getting people to use Linux no matter how much destruction they bring. Steam games on Linux are not what anyone has in mind when they say Linux doesn’t have games. Because Linux isn’t binary compatibility, it’s libre software.

In my circles, if someone says “Linux such and such”, we assume they might be referring to their FreeBSD computer as well. Here it seems Linux is more likely to refer to Android. Emulating a sketchy Windows game doesn’t make Linux the better platform for games. The Windows games are always going to be best on Windows, and now your Linux computer has malware on it.