Privacy

32229 readers

780 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

132

Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app? (blog.cryptographyengineering.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

45 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Blog post by crypto professor Matthew Green, discussing what Telegram does (I wasn't familiar with it) and criticizing its cryptography. He says Telegram by default is not end-to-end encrypted. It does have an end-to-end "secret chat" feature, but it's a nuisance to activate and only works for two-person chats (not groups) where both people are online when the chat starts.

It still isn't clear to me why Telegram's founder was arrested. Green expresses some concern over that but doesn't give any details that weren't in the headlines.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Certificate Authority

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Doesn't the concept of using a CA (which are generally also central authorities) go against the idea of E2EE that only required to (or more) endpoints or am I missing something? Signal group messages (and the protocol/concept behind it) work without a CA. I think I'm missing something, can you connect the dots for me?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

The CA is purely a way to provide validation that the endpoints being connected are who they say they are; the actual signing certificates are still private. Apple uses a central directory; Signal depends on certificates linked to one way hashes of phone numbers.