this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2023
128 points (97.1% liked)

Privacy

31990 readers
503 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

Related communities

Chat rooms

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm not sure if it is entirely accurate to compare them in this way, as "Matrix" refers to simply the protocol, whereas "Signal" could refer to the applications, server, and protocol. That being said, is there any fundamental difference in how the Matrix ecosystem of federated servers, and independently developed applications compares to that of Signal that would make it less secure, overall, to use?

The most obvious security vulnerability that I can think of is that the person you are communicating with (or, conceivably, oneself, as well) is using an insecure/compromised application that may be leaking information. I would assume that the underlying encryption of the data is rather trustworthy, and the added censorship resistance of federating the servers is a big plus. However, I do wonder if there are any issues with extra metadata generation, or usage tracking that could be seen as an opsec vulnerability for an individual. Signal, somewhat famously, when subpoenaed to hand over data, can only hand over the date that the account was created, and the last time it was used. What would happen if the authorities go after a Matrix user? What information about that user would they be able to gather?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

Signal goes very far to protect even the tiniest bits of metadata.

For example see sealed sender, private contact discovery and group v2.

On the other hand, matrix stores your profile info, group membership, and ongoing conversation metadata in plaintext, some of them replicated across homeservers. In addition to metadata that matrix doesn't encrypt, they also do not encrypt some actual data like emoji reactions.

Edit: clarified that conversations are not in plaintext. My wording what confusing as hell sorry.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Matrix doesn't store your ongoing conversation in plaintext. It's encrypted by default.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

What I meant by that is not the actual message content, but who you're talking to and when is stored on the home server.

load more comments (4 replies)