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this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Privacy
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Signal isn't federated. Signal has centralized servers. Signal requires phone number identification to use it. Signal stores your encryption key on their servers.... Relying on sgx enclaves to 'protrct' your encryption key.
Signal can go down. Signal knows who you talk to, just by message timing. Signal knows how frequently you talk to someone. Signal can decrypt your traffic by attack their own sgx enclaves and extracting your encryption key.
These are all possible threats and capabilities. You have to decide what tradeoff makes sense to you. Fwiw I still use signal.
That would surprise me. What's your source for this?
https://signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
master_key is never stored or sent to the SGX, only c2, the entropy bits. The user's password is still required to generate the key.
Brute forcing 4-6 digit pins is trivial.
And even if the user set a actual password, it's still very trivial
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/07/10/a-few-thoughts-about-signals-secure-value-recovery/
"Very trivial" if they set a proper password? Yet the source you provide says it's robustly secure
I can't find the phrase robustly secure in the last link:
https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/07/10/a-few-thoughts-about-signals-secure-value-recovery/
Signal asks users to set a pin/password which needs to be periodically reentered. This discourages people from using high entropy passwords like BIP38.
The password is literally a pin
If you set a small pin, perhaps. Most people set a password
Pin is the suggested option, so I really doubt "most" of the people choose password
Most people who care* I guess would be more apt
For the people who really care, they can disable The pin. I believe the client will generate a BIP 38 password randomly, and use that for the data encrypted in the SVR. But all the data is still uploaded to the cloud. So if there's a problem with the SVR encoding, the BIP 38 password generation etc the data is still exploited
Not only do you have to care, everyone you talk to has to do the same thing, because if your counterparty has their key in the cloud, the conversation is at risk.
Regardless, the master key is never uploaded
All the bits to reconstruct the master key minus the pin code are uploaded. So it's equivalent to uploading to the cloud The master key itself.
Very few people are using BIP 38 level passwords. So the vast majority of people have their key constructively uploaded fully in the cloud
One nit to pick, messages have to transit through the signal network. And they could be recorded during transit. Carnivore style