529
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
529 points (99.4% liked)
Technology
60044 readers
2988 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Matrix has absolute shit adoption, but is open source and pretty secure. Then there is always Telegram.
Do you still have to consciously enable encryption in Telegram? That was the gripe people had with it for a while. Chats weren’t encrypted by default.
Yes, you still do for E2EE.
Okay cool. Thanks. Oh I didn't even know telegram had encryption capability
Almost every chat platform uses encryption by default, including telegram. If you are talking about E2EE, you have to enable that manually for each chat.
Matrix is really awesome and I hope it becomes the gold standard. However, if I were a Snowden, I would pick signal over matrix for the simple reason that signal doesn't store your conversations on the server. Matrix does. Those conversations are encrypted client side with a key the server doesn't have, but they are still stored centrally. That has advantages and disadvantages. It is much better for usability, because you can log in from any device and you see all of your conversations in one place. Unlike signal, there are no primary and linked devices, you can run matrix on desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, or straight from a web browser. When logging in from a new device, you need your username, password, and to either authenticate the session from another device, or manually put in your encryption key to decode the chats. That also means there is no need for backup or restore of anything other than your encryption key. For that reason, I am more frequently pushing people to install matrix than signal these days.
However if security is more important than usability, signal wins, if only because there is never a question of storing anything on any server. Start a chat with somebody, make the messages disappearing, and you can be pretty sure that as long as neither of your devices are captured while the chat is in progress it will never be seen by anybody.
This breakdown makes me much more hesitant to ever use Signal over Matrix. Signal is storing the keys themselves, where as Matrix is storing messages that can’t be decrypted and no keys. If the keys on Signal’s servers are ever stolen, you can kiss all of your message privacy goodbye. If a Matrix server is hacked, the user can’t do anything with the messages because they’re encrypted and no keys are stored.
You also have the option to host your own Matrix server and have more control—something that is not an option with Signal.