Privacy

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Telegram founder and CEO alledges signal has backdoors, they don't provide reproduceible builds, etc. (lemm.ee)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

215 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Here's what he said in a post on his telegram channel:

🤫 A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly “secure” messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad 🥷

🥸 The US government spent $3M to build Signal’s encryption, and today the exact same encryption is implemented in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Google Messages and even Skype. It looks almost as if big tech in the US is not allowed to build its own encryption protocols that would be independent of government interference 🐕‍🦺

🕵️‍♂️ An alarming number of important people I’ve spoken to remarked that their “private” Signal messages had been exploited against them in US courts or media. But whenever somebody raises doubt about their encryption, Signal’s typical response is “we are open source so anyone can verify that everything is all right”. That, however, is a trick 🤡

🕵️‍♂️ Unlike Telegram, Signal doesn’t allow researchers to make sure that their GitHub code is the same code that is used in the Signal app run on users’ iPhones. Signal refused to add reproducible builds for iOS, closing a GitHub request from the community. And WhatsApp doesn’t even publish the code of its apps, so all their talk about “privacy” is an even more obvious circus trick 💤

🛡 Telegram is the only massively popular messaging service that allows everyone to make sure that all of its apps indeed use the same open source code that is published on Github. For the past ten years, Telegram Secret Chats have remained the only popular method of communication that is verifiably private 💪

Original post: https://t.me/durov/274

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[–] [email protected] 67 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Sounds like someone is mad that security experts would rather trust a tried-and-true encryption standard over Telegram's encryption which is known to not be anywhere near as secure as the Signal protocol.

Pavel resorting to outright slander to promote Telegram is not something I expected to see.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

he does raise very valid points about reproducible builds, which should be a priority if your product is security

Edit: oh @Wolflink below points out that such builds are available for Android, but iOS has issues stemming from Apple and not Signal. This then begs the question, why is Telegram reproducible on iOS?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

You need some loops to jump through to get there. But that can be achieved for Signal as well, if you check the discussions regarding reproducible builds for Signal's iOS client, you'll see that people just decided it is not worth the hassle to push it through.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

This then begs the question, why is Telegram reproducible on iOS?

Is it really.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

that's indeed what I am asking

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Sounds like someone is mad that security experts would rather trust a tried-and-true encryption standard over Telegram’s encryption which is known to not be anywhere near as secure as the Signal protocol.

There's an issue in Russia with graduates of a few of the "kinda top" universities considering themselves elite, but not quite being as qualified as they think.

Durov's brother won a few programming competitions for highschoolers. Because of that apparently he should be considered something in cryptography. For people thinking like this at least.

Pavel resorting to outright slander to promote Telegram is not something I expected to see.

Why, it's very much like him.