this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2024
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Privacy

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I am a firm believer that there are many privacy techniques you should focus on before encrypted messaging because they will offer you much more “bang for your buck,” things like good passwords, two-factor authentication, and even encrypted email. That said, I still believe that encrypted messaging is a critical part of a well-rounded privacy and security strategy. While the vast majority of our day-to-day conversations may be benign, it can still offer a lot of insight into who we are as people – our routines, likes, and personal thoughts. This information – mundane or not – is worth protecting.

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[–] [email protected] 115 points 2 months ago (9 children)

TLDR: Avoid Telegram and WhatsApp. Recommended messengers are Session, Signal, SimpleX and Threema. Honorable mention: Briar.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Session should probably be avoided as well, primarily because they've disabled things like perfect forward secrecy and a few other security measures that probably should not have been disabled.

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 months ago (4 children)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago

Oh damn. When I first looked into Session I was really excited, until I found out that the anonymity layer was based on an altcoin. Which means that you're only anonymous as long as line goes up. I didn't expect it to fail quite this quickly though.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago
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[–] [email protected] 21 points 2 months ago

Honorable mention to Matrix as well

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[–] [email protected] 66 points 2 months ago (17 children)

Another basic thing -- If your messenger is throwing your messages in a notification; it's being logged. Google was found to be logging almost all notification content. Make sure your message app isn't putting the content of messages into notifications.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 2 months ago (12 children)

If the app implements their own notification system and doesn't rely on GCM then Google isn't able to log them as far as I know.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

UnifiedPush instead of their own implantation would be better for power consumption ig.

Overall a choice between which Notifier you want to choose would be nice.

Between the apps own notifier and UnifiedPush (also has a Fallback to GCM if wanted)

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

Now this is why I read comments. You're absolutely right and I knew this info and just hadn't put the two together. Thank you. Settings changed.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago

That's if they use Google's push notification backend on firebase. FOSS apps from F-droid usually don't.

Tl;Dr install F-droid damnit

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Unless you don't have Google or Apple services.

Also I don't think they log the normal Android notification mechanism. (Not push)

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 months ago (2 children)

What I like about Matrix so much is that it can be run fully on your own infrastructure, even the TURN server for VOIP, and you can build the clients from source yourself too.

But I agree that it's quite difficult to use. And until now only my dad and my spouse use it with me because they love me and trust me. But they both always have problems with their clients. It randomly logs out and then they have to login with the password and with the encryption key again. For a long time calling didn't work because I misconfigured the server. Then videos were for the longest time uploaded in full size and anything longer than a few seconds would be rejected. The whole spaces thing is implemented very weirdly so it confuses them. And then the threads are even worse so we can't use them because nobody gets how to do it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Signal ux is much better fyi, though I accept it's hard to roll your own. Trade offs are generally worth

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

As far as I know you can't host your own signal server which connects to their servers.

I'm using Signal with the rest of the family and most friends.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago

As far as I know you can't host your own signal server which connects to their servers.

That's right, Signal is not federated.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Use Simplex Chat instead

The downside with Simplex Chat is that there is no server side accounts

[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 months ago (9 children)

XMPP, for example, does not enable end-to-end encryption by default

Why always these false myths? The most popular XMPP mobile clients do enable it by default.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (4 children)

It was a conscious decision for them not to enforce E2EE by default. https://web.archive.org/web/20211215132539/https://infosec-handbook.eu/articles/xmpp-aitm/

XMPP clients have like 10 different implementations because of that and are not always consistent with each other or even function universally across platforms.

But I'm not an author. That would be @[email protected].

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Right? It is a generic protocol for all sorts of communications, some of which don’t require encryption. Yet every modern chat client for human-to-human communication has OMEMO, OTR, & PGP encryption options.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Matrix doesn’t offer disappearing messages (which I consider important for digital minimalism and cybersecurity.

I noticed this in the article and figured I'd throw my 2 cents in. This might be a spicy take, but I actually can't stand apps that do this.

When I was in school I had someone harass me online with threats of violence (they spent a couple of hours insulting and threatening me) then lie to the staff that I was harassing them with even more extreme shit. The staff and other students all took their side until I logged in and showed the conversation. If the messages had disappeared I wouldn't have been able to prove my innocence.

I very firmly want encrypted communications for privacy (I use Signal and Matrix), but I am quite wary of purging communications automatically. That said, it's anyone's right to use services that auto delete and my right not to.

I'm curious what other people's take on this would be.

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

Deleting messages is still a thing. If there is a message you need to preserve, take a screenshot. If you are worried that someone might think that the screenshot is fake, take a screen recording, or even better, use your phones camera to physically record your screen.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (6 children)

SimpleX is currently my favourite. Yeah, there are some small concerns, but where aren't they? I hope SimpleX can grow more popular and I'm also waiting for a full-featured desktop client, so it'll be easier to convince people to switch.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The missing unifiedpush feature. I don't need another battery burning messenger.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I hate that simplex is like this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

That is my one and only issue with Simplex. It drinks battery lika a Puerto Rican drinks rum on weekends.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (4 children)

Why do people like Matrix? It's really slow. Even most of the non-Electron clients consume a ton of resources (even more than Electron apps usually do).

Especially Gomuks, by far the worst offender. It consumes nearly a gigabyte of memory and it's a TUI.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think it more comes down to it not being Discord than people liking it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (7 children)

Well, it's not privacy-focused.. but I do like Revolt for this purpose. It's performant, looks very similar to Discord, and I think they're adding E2EE eventually.

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

The issue has historically been with the server. (It was buggy as hell) These days it is much more stable and less prone to collapse.

I don't like Matrix because it gives a option to not encrypt communications. Encryption should be enforced and transparent

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (4 children)

I like Signal, but I really miss multi device support. Same issue with Threema.

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

Yeah that's a bummer. Signal has multi device support but only for desktop and iPad (yeah, not Android tablets), but you always need to have a master phone device.

It's been an issue for so long, but this is Signal, they do whatever the f they want.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

encrypted email

Besides being a form of messaging (so the text somewhat contradicts itself), typical email is a deeply insecure protocol.
In my opinion, it's probably impossible to secure without making a new protocol or making such drastic changes that it might as well be considered one.

Here are some key concerns regarding the usual PGP-powered encrypted email:

  • Email, at a simple level, works much akin to physical email — there's an "envelope" containing important info regarding the communicating parties, which can't be encrypted, otherwise the mailing servers wouldn't know where to forward the messages. This essentially leaks a lot of metadata that can be almost as valuable as the message body itself.
  • There's no forward secrecy — one of the best cryptography features that has become pretty much a commodity in modern systems is forward secrecy, which prevents attackers from decrypting older messages after gaining access to one of the keys.
  • While not an issue with the protocol itself, it's the sad reality and we need to consider — most people use GMail, Outlook and the like, which ultimately need to read your emails in plaintext, for better or worse reasons (search is incredibly useful, but some big players don't stop there of course :p).
  • Another thing is the fact that it's incredibly easy to have an imbalance of encryption, i.e. someone is encrypting their messages, but others aren't. With the very popular email culture of quoting (be it top or bottom posting), an unencrypted party in the the conversation can leak important information.
  • PGP is... peculiar, so to speak. I has a lot of issues, mostly stemming from its age (which could also be a source of robustness and security, due to being very battle-tested, but I don't think that's quite the case with PGP/GPG), tries to do too much and typically has a clunky UI, which impedes wider and proper adoption by less technically people.

This isn't to say people should definitely stop using and promoting encrypted email, since it can be useful.
It's just it gives, more often than not, a false sense of security and can lead less proficient users to send sensitive data through this medium which isn't nearly secure enough for such use cases. Preferably, people with such threat models should opt for better alternatives, most suggested in that article (such as, but definitely not limited to, Signal, SimpleX, Matrix+Olm, XMPP+OTR/OMEMO, sharing files via MagicWormhole, encrypting with tools like age).

On a slightly tangential note, I think someone should make a Matrix client with an email client interface. I started working on a new traditional chat client (completely nonfunctional still, very much in-dev), but I've been honestly thinking more and more about making one looking like an e-mail client, where there isn't much focus on instant room-based chats, but rather on longer-lived 1-to-1 and list-like exchange of messages.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

As always, the problem isnt using a new service or super secure app, the problem is making everyone else I talk to use said app, not happening anytime soon sadly.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (7 children)

Sad that Wire wasn't mentioned. I think its the only one that encrypts everything, allows anonymous accounts (no phone number needed!), and has independent clients on all platforms (no mobile app install required, but they have one) that seamlessly syncs messages on all clients

Oh, and its free and open-source.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Last update on F-Droid was 2 years ago tho

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

As a long time user of Session, it is hard to believe someone would describe it as "user-friendly".

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

We've been on simplex for a few months, I like it quite a bit. We made diff accounts for each device and added them all to a group.

Notifications arrive reliably on graphene (no google services), and KDE connect.

I don't love the desktop client and wish I could change text size and scaling. I was able to message the dev about it in simplex and got replies which was cool

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I wish Molly was brought up. It is way better than Signal

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