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Regarding the trick of an adversary gaining access by emailing or SMS'ing a QR code for adding another device...
Why does the new device not demand the PIN before being added?
It does, I tried it. Though, that may have been an addition since the attacks started.
Though, in that specific case - Russian agents conducting espionage via targeted individuals - it's very likely they surveil their targets long enough to catch their device PIN before they nab the phone and return it. In the end, there is very little recourse to defend against this type of Evil Maid attack. Signal is really better at protecting against mass surveillance, but for individuals directly targeted by state espionage? You would need serious opsec, using air-gapped computers kept in safes or guarded by humans 24x7 and other crazy stuff. They have rules about what can be physically done with devices containing top secret information for a good reason.
If they could surveil the device to see the PIN being entered then no app would protect them.
My Signal only asks for a PIN about once per month so that would be a lot of screen surveillance hours to sit through in order to catch that moment.
More likely is that it was fixed since the breach but I cannot find release notes (hard to search on my phone).
Here are two reasons you might not want to use Signal: Your contacts, your settings, your entire Signal experience is tied to a Signal account managed by Signal. Metadata—who you’re talking to, when, and how often—can still be collected and analyzed. Question everything.
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How's signal compared to Element?
Also, is there a secure way to directly send messages to someone else's phone without the message having to be stored on a central server? As in they're only stored on the recipient device. Is that even possible with how the internet works and how packets are routed between networks? Even if the server has no way of decrypting messages by default, just having the encrypted messages stored there is a liability because your encryption keys can easily get leaked by malware running on your device, phishing, etc.
element keeps a lot of metadata unencrypted. but it is federated, you can choose the server that has access to it (deny federation for the room or set up federation ACLs if important to keep it there), and because of the former it's harder to just shut down.
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/660
signal doesn't, in theory they don't even know the recipient of your messages (but there's a twist in that part as I remember), but it is centralized around US servers. it is easier to shut down.
this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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