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submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Nuvalon@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

i've just seen a comment in a post, in this very community, saying people trust signal because of missinformation (from what i could undertand).

if this is true, then i have a few questions:

-what menssaging app should i use for secure communications? i need an app that balances simplicity and security.

-how to explain it to my friends who use signal because i recomended?

-what this means for other apps in general?

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[-] pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zip 9 points 2 days ago

The only data they store are account creation time and last connection time.

https://signal.org/bigbrother/district-of-columbia/

[-] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works -2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Well no, they store more data than this. They store your contacts as well, that's how they can do contact discovery. There's a hashing and linked list mechanism for it. It's better now. But it used to be a simple hash, something for which you could build a rainbow table in a few hours, at the worst.

It also.foesnt really matter if the software itself can easily be tampered with in memory by the hypervisor. Like I said, they are putting a lot of trust in Intel SGX. And thus the data doesn't need to be stored for issues to arise.

[-] pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zip 8 points 2 days ago

https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/

Since the enclave attests to the software that’s running remotely, and since the remote server and OS have no visibility into the enclave, the service learns nothing about the contents of the client request. It’s almost as if the client is executing the query locally on the client device.

[-] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works -3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

... Providing you trust Intel SGX.

[-] pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago

Providing you trust Intel SGX (and AWS for giving them access to actual SGX and not just emulating a compromised instruction set)

😃

conspiracy begins...

[-] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 days ago

What conspiracy? CPU bugs aren't a conspiracy, they are just a fact. Amazon's involvement with American three letter agencies isn't a conspiracy, it's a fact.

[-] Ontimp@feddit.org 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yea but if you worry about CPU bugs there is no such thing as trust, no matter who owns the infrastructure. Any software can have critical bugs and any system that can be accessed remotely can be compromised. Personally I'd trust the people at Signal that they have made a reasonable architecture section to balance availability and privacy

[-] Count042@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

I don't take anything from someone I don't trust that also explicitly doesn't use warrant canaries because he says they don't work in contradiction to every legal authority.

It's also an issue that they run the signal server on one single AWS region.

It isn't hard or even all that expensive to run on multiple regions.

[-] wildbus8979@sh.itjust.works -2 points 2 days ago

It's not me you need to tell this though.

this post was submitted on 20 Mar 2026
201 points (90.4% liked)

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