This is an article written by telegram’s founder and CEO Pavel Durov in 2019 on “Why whatsapp will never be secure”. Your thoughts?
Sure, fuck WhatsApp, but Telegram isn’t even end-to-end encrypted most of the time. Their group chats never are, and their “secret chat” encryption for non-group chats must be explicitly enabled and hardly ever is because it disables some features. And when it is encrypted, it’s with some dubious nonstandard cryptography.
It’s also pseudo open source; they do publish source code once in a while but it never corresponds to the binaries that nearly everyone actually uses.
And the audacity to talk about metadata when Telegram accounts still require a phone number today (as they did five years ago when this post was written) is just… 🤯
State-sponsored exploits against WhatsApp might be more common than against Telegram, or at least we hear about them more, but it’s not because the app is more vulnerable: it’s because governments don’t need to compromise the endpoint to read your Telegram messages: they can just add a new device to your account with an SMS and see everything.
(╯° °）╯︵ ┻━┻
Anything claiming to prioritize privacy yet asking for your phone number (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, …) is a farce.
Anything claiming to prioritize privacy yet asking for your phone number (Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, …) is a farce.
Yeah, sure. The privacy farce signal.
I’m getting tired of this stupid hardline-take.
Shit, 2019 really was five years ago.
Telegram isn’t perfect, but it is infinitely better than Whatsapp because it doesn’t belong to Facebook, and also isn’t from the United States. Also it can be used by normies without problem, unlike Matrix or Xmpp or what have you.
Brother, it has servers all over the world (including the US) where it hosts your data unencrypted. Telegram is nearly not inifinitely better than WhatsApp.
Sure, WhatsApp exposes you to US jurisdiction and Meta bullshit. At the same time, Telegram is very friendly with the Kremlin and associated intelligence services. So it basically comes down to whether you want to be spied on by Russian or US entities.
Source: Wired cover story
Wired story from a year ago about the FSB using Telegram to track down political activists.
And the audacity to talk about metadata when Telegram accounts still require a phone number today (as they did five years ago when this post was written) is just… 🤯
Not only that, but I believe that they actively try to prevent VoIP numbers from being used to create accounts.
I don’t agree with everything but that last point of yours. Requiring your phone number only means your are not anonymous. There is no need to be anonymous to communicate privately. In fact, it can be counterproductive, since your are much more vulnerable to social engineering.
And also not secure if somebody sim swapped you, and then your privacy goes into the hands of the FSB agent who sim swapped you
Then what is the choice?
Signal is just fine. This with the PhoneNumber is a really stupid hardliner-take.
Something can be private without being anonymous.
Read up on Xmpp or matrix as good alternatives.
Matrix not yet untill they implemented proper encryption and security stuff
SimpleX is pretty cool
Simplex - requires nothing, just install. But you connect with other people by sending a code outside of SimpleX. Though they’ve added a directory service for groups.
XMPP
Wire (not Wiremin), though it requires an email account, which is easily addressed with a disposable email.
Signal is very secure from what I’ve read, despite the phone number identifier.
Bravo, bravo, bravo!!
Dude, see you on the same side of the barricades when the time comes to fight the centralized army of agent Smiths 👏👏👏
Signal is great. Stop being overzealous
What a load of hipocrisy. The dude uses unauthenticated DH for his apps “secret chats”, which a bored student with a laptop can MITM in seconds. Other chats use just TLS, meaning they get to read EVERYTHING.
Use Signal, people.
He’s not wrong about WhatsApp, though. WhatsApp is closed source, and did have a string of vulnerabilities that lead to remote code execution. I disagree with the presumption that open source means secure, but their security guarantees can’t be validated to the same extent their competition can be validated.
Of course, WhatsApp being bad doesn’t make Telegram any good. I don’t think their DH is still vulnerable (MTProto 2.0 has been out for ages now) but as a general purpose chat app, it’s practically worthless in terms of privacy.
Signal beats WhatsApp/RCS, which beat Telegram, which beats IRC/SMS.
which a bored student with a laptop can MITM in seconds
No, how can a bored student breach e2ee in seconds? note that no such cases have been reported by any telegram user so far.
Because the DH is unauthenticated, as I already said. Users can’t report it because there is no way to tell for them.
Users can’t report it because there is no way to tell for them
Atleast the one who breached can tell? no telegram users data have been seen on dark web yet, no person/org have claimed to get any vulnerability in their system. Also if its that easy to breach why govt’s keep banning telegram for not giving them userdata? despite telegram is the biggest app where most terrorist orgs operate, hub of piracy and illegal things, you can call it “public” darkweb.
if its that easy to breach why govt’s keep banning telegram for not giving them userdata
Same reason they ask Apple for backdoors even though they crack iPhones routinely. It’s about legal precedent.
The data is available. See this article - it’s a Google link.
Check stories about russian journalists…
I have some friends working in the police, many years they showed me how they can read messages of like anyone on telegram I was trying to tell people to stop using telegram for years, but now at least therecs some conversation is going on because of the journalists
Signal is based in the United States, enjoy having CIA and NSA reading all your messages.
Unlike Telegram, WhatsApp is not open source
An absolutely meaningless statement when the source sucks. The corporation that releases the source code maintains full control over it, keeping out stuff that security researchers have suggested for years.
Telegram backend is still closed-source, btw
“Here’s what someone who has never created a private messenger thinks about Whatsapp’s privacy.”
Why would anyone care about what he has to say? 💀
Owned by Facebook, which is a giant US company.
Of fucking course it has backdoors.
I’m confused regarding why you don’t consider telegram a private messenger.
It’s been a while since I looked into it, and things might have changed since then, but some stuff off the top of my head:
- Messages are stored on the server, not on the device
- end-to-end encryption not enabled by default
- uses proprietary encryption, making security audits difficult
Apart from that it’s somewhat politically questionable, based in Dubai (I think), with dubious financial backing and Russian developers. Because it’s closed source and the encryption is proprietary, there’s no way of knowing how much info it leaks.
Messages are stored on the server, not on the device
Yes.
end-to-end encryption not enabled by default
True that and telegram sucks big here
uses proprietary encryption, making security audits difficult
The MTProto isnt open source but its fully documented, there have been security audits on it.
dubious financial backing
No. Pavel Durov have always said since starting he paid for telegram’s servers from his pocket, in recent years telegram has started monetisation programs to cover its costs.
Russian developers
The founders were born in Russia, but they now have dual citizenship of UAE and France. If you are talking about politically questionable, even signal have been accused of having backdoors for CIA.
Never has been, no default e2ee, and those exploits that leaked a ton of users locations.
Not to mention, no messenger is verifiably private unless it is fully open source.
Telegram isn’t, so you must be very confused indeed
Clicking the link gives me the following warning:
The site ahead may contain harmful programs
Firefox blocked this page because it might try to trick you into installing programs that harm your browsing experience (for example, by changing your homepage or showing extra ads on sites you visit).
weird, works for me in firefox with all privacy features enabled, can you please try this link: https://telegra.ph/Why-WhatsApp-Will-Never-Be-Secure-05-15
Your original link is blocked at DNS level on my ‘Threat intelligence’ blocklist.
And that link is blocked at DNS level by ‘Toxic’ and ‘Stop Forum Spam’ filters.
So it’s blocked before the browser can even connect for me.
I got the same warning for the original link with ff as well.
Your comment link didn’t throw up a red flag.
sorry for the inconvenience, thing is this website supports multiple domains and is banned in some countries so we have to use different domains to access it, which might give red flags.
Great, thank you!
WhatsApp’s e2e encryption is based on the Signal protocol and active by default. Telegram’s is opt-in. So much for Telegram’s superior privacy…
They tell whatever they want until their claims can be validated with the source code. If we take it for granted that they use an original, unmodified version of the signal protocol programming libraries, there are still multiple questions:
- how often do they update the version they use
- what are they doing with the messages after local decryption (receiving), and before encryption (sending)
- how are they storing the secret keys used for encryption, and what exactly are they doing with it in the code
Any of these questions could reveal problems that would invalidate any security that is added by using the signal protocol. Like if they use an outdated version of the programming library that has a known vulnerability, if they analyze the messages in their plain data form, or on the UI, or the keypresses as you type them, or if they are mishandling your encryption keys by sending them or a part of them to wherever
No. Whatsapp’s metadata is not encrypted and can be used by its parent company, also backups are not secure. While telegram’s is opt in (yeah that sucks and here’s there excuse for that https://tsf.telegram.org/manuals/e2ee-simple), they are as secure as signal’s (if not more).
Definitely not. Telegram’s MTProto encryption protocol is garbage
The Signal protocol is far superior. Stop spreading misinformation.
That paper is eight years old and yet there has been no major hack of the Telegram protocol.
That may be true, but it proves that MTProto isn’t “as secure as signal’s (if not more)” as OP said
I am not talking about mtproto lmao. I was talking about their opt-in e2ee feature. Edit: Also the research you shared is based on mtproto 1.0 which telegram abandoned almost a decade ago and there have been No such defects found in mtproto 2 yet.
MTProto is what Telegram uses for “Secret Chats”, their opt-in end-to-end encryption. Normal messages aren’t encrypted at all. They’re stored in plain text on Telegram servers. The fact that E2EE is opt-in already makes this app ridiculous. On top of that, it isn’t even secure or private lol
the fact that E2EE is opt-in already makes this app ridiculous
in matter of privacy, yes. But it have cool features so.
They’re stored in plain text on Telegram servers
No, non secret chats use mptroto but with different schema, thats not plain servers. And no data breach have been reported in telegram yet if it was “that” easy to breach them. From my last comment: “Also the research you shared is based on mtproto 1.0 which telegram abandoned almost a decade ago and there have been No such defects found in mtproto 2 yet.”
But it have [sic!] cool features so.
So what? If minimum requirements are not given, it can be as cool as possible. Only not so smart people think that’s a good deal.
MTProto is how Telegram accomplishes “secret chats”. The bugs in 1.0 have been resolved ages ago, but the design is still needlessly vulnerable.
Various defects and design flaws have been described in an attempt to verify the security properties: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.03141.pdf As far as I know, the vulnerability has been patched, though I can’t remember if they ever fixed up the rest of their protocol, because I can’t find a practical use case for using private chats when other apps do it better with more features.
Signal’s app UX may be behind Telegram’s, but their protocol is better.
And that UX makes it a hard sell to non-tech/privacy folks.
I had a few converts, then they pulled SMS. My converts left.
Telegram has its problems, I completely agree the encryption issue is problematic. But how do you get non-tech people to use a tool like this when to have a new device get the history, or signing into multiple devices simultaneously, requires transmitting an encryption key? I really don’t know.
I know SimpleX is working on this very issue - their current approach requires switching between active devices by scanning a QR code (or sharing code between devices out-of-band). So currently only one device can be active with your credsntials/ID. It has an ok UI, I’d say slightly better than Signal. But it’s security and privacy are just about the best I’ve seen.
This seems to be the big hurdle - people want a simple login, most don’t care if their convos are stored in servers iut means they can just login.
I’m using telegram with a few people for just this reason, since it gets us off SMS. They like that they can use whatever device is in front of them.
Getting people to switch to Telegram is far easier than anything else, since it’s UI is much better than Signal, Wire, XMPP clients (which can be some of the best).
We know exactly how bad Whatsapp is from a privacy standpoint - I’d choose telegram over it any day.
I don’t really get why you would trust Telegram more than WhatsApp. WhatsApp has every message end to end encrypted at the very least; if you can break its protocol (basically Signal with a bunch of extra features) you’ll either be rich or famous.
Unlike WhatsApp, Telegram sells ads. After getting caught committing financial crimes they had to drop their crypto money making scheme, and now they’re also strongly pushing some kind of Discord Nitro stuff, after years of “trust us, there’s a rich guy that really just wants you to have a free messenger” funding.
WhatsApp is registered in various places, but at least not the British Virgin Islands and Dubai. Telegram’s excessively complicated corporate structure (not unlike thst of FTX actually) supposedly protects it from law enforcement, but headquartering it in a tax invasion country and a country where raped women get arrested for having sex outside marriage don’t exactly give me much confidence.
WhatsApp is worse than alternatives, but I don’t really see why it would be worse than Telegram. All I can see is vague claims that come down to “yeah, but Facebook” but there’s no hard evidence of any real privacy impact unless you’re already feeding the Zuck your private information through your Facebook account.
It I couldn’t get people to switch to Signal, I’d put all of my contacts on Discord. At least Discord doesn’t spread disinformation about its supposed safety, doesn’t invent its own encryption protocol that then doesn’t get used in practice, and doesn’t see the need to hide from law enforcement. Plus, its UI is better than Telegram’s for most chats I have anyway.
I would prefer telegram because its just not from Meta. There is bounty on breaking telegram’s protocol too.
Telegram sells ads on public channels with consent of owners and the ads are based on the channel data and not users data. They are back up with their crypto schemes, infact idk whats wrong with crypto, they are better for privacy than normal bank transactions. Anyone cant pay from their pocket for lifetime, it was coming since longway because telegram have no parent company to fund it neither its founder are that rich to spend billions of dollars on it every year. Those “nitro” features didnt take anything away from free users tho, also if they are trying to cover up their cost from the userbase that just proves they have no dubious financing from backdoors.
I dont know how rape laws are connected with a messenger being based there. US have its social problems too or wherever signal is located, every country have social issues.
Yeah facebook is big enough reason to not use facebook. On top of that there have been no data breaches, almost no big outages in telegram till date. They offer a lot of features, from bots to channels, to large public communities and much more.
Telegram just claims its private enough and they never said they are e2ee by default, I dont see the misinformation here, yeah they exaggerate it sometimes but the fact that there have been no data breaches in a decade with almost 800 million monthly active users is quite a bit of achievement. They invested on developing their own encryption protocol, it maybe less private but they made it to remove complexities which signal have. There’s no point on having some 100% secure stuff when no one gonna use it due to complexities, telegram have fueled pro democratic protests worldwide and I thank them for that atleast (even they got banned in many countries for doing so).
Multi-device End-to-end encrypted chats are a mess
I’m not going to read it all but matrix managed to deliver on fully encrypted messages that you can have on multiple devices.
Not just Matrix. The one major XMPP clients use now, OMEMO, does that too.
×Years ago*.
Kills me I was running XMPP on my phone in 2010. Couldn’t get people off SMS to XMPP, though it synced with my desktop messenger even then! Yea, encryption hadn’t been fully sorted yet, but it’s not like SMS has encryption!
they are as secure as signal’s (if not more
Incorrect. They are trivially breakable as it is unauthenticated DH which is as good as no encryption at all.
good as no encryption at all.
0 data breaches till date.
I’m not saying that WhatsApp is the good guy here, Meta sucks but compared to Telegram I rather trust them if I have to.
And the unencrypted backups are only problematic when you use the automatic Google Drive upload.WHY?
Telegram is a shell company and only offers mediocre, opt-in encryption. The thing I like most about them is their support for 3rd party clients.
I have to use their service for some contacts same as with WhatsApp but I would prefer more secure and privacy friendly alternatives.You obviously haven’t seen the charts of the metadata that WhatsApp collects. And we know how anti-consuner, adversarial and anti-privacy Facebook is overall with their tracking pixels, ghost profiles, etc.
Telegram at least doesn’t have the FB dataset. FB knows about me, though I’ve never once in my life been on their website or used anything related to them. Not once. The first I heard of FB I saw immediately the privacy problem with them, and made sure to never have anything to do with them. But they know about me from other peoe posting pics and such, which they then correlate with sites I’ve been on that have tracking pixels. WhatsApp ads a metric shitton of metadata to that pile, with date, time, location, duration of conversations, businesses you’re near at the time, their operating hours, etc, etc. They have a massive, constantly growing dataset, which they can easily correlate elements.
WhatsApp may be encrypted, but I trust Zuck so little that I wouldn’t doubt they capture keystrokes in app before the message is sent. They have the capability as was shown in a recent research article (though no evidence of it happening).
Id rather not use Telegram, but it’s far lesser of the two evils. I’m trying to get folks to other apps. Signal doesn’t sell, SimpleX isn’t quite ready, I think Wire has the same stored encryption key issue, though I may be mistaken (I’m not fully clear how it’s managed).
He writes as if signal’s devs would have to be quiet about whatsapps encryption
E.g.
Last year, the founders of WhatsApp left the company due to concerns over users’ privacy [16]. They are surely tied by either gag orders or NDAs, so are unable to discuss backdoors publicly without risking their fortunes and freedom. They were able to admit, however, that “they sold their users’ privacy” [17].
Yet signal published multiple posts about how secure whatsapp is. I don’t buy it but it’s not like they would be quiet. (They=moxie) https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/ https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
I believe Moxie helped them integrate Signal protocol into WA successfully while preserving user integrity and privacy.
However, it wouldnt be out of the realm for them to make modifications to their custom protocol that Moxie helped design, and turn it into a privacy nightmare after the fact.
Exactly
WhatsApp will be never private and secure, while Telegram will be never private. 😁
Who said telegram is secure?
No one said the opposite, while on WhatsApp they had several vulnerabilities that allowed attackers to get the user phone control.
An example: https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/new-whatsapp-bug-couldve-let-attackers.html
But there were many more vulnerabilities or “features” that WhatsApp allowed attackers or governments to get into user data. While I haven’t read anything about against Telegram security.
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It is secure as secure is logging into your bank account from your web browser.
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I think you are mixing concepts, encryptions isn’t related to “secure” but to “privacy”. On my example, your data on bank is encrypted via SSL which the server has the private key to read it, but it is encrypted. Telegram is the same, your messages are being encrypted by a public key owned by the server, but it is encrypted, just not end to end.
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I’m not qualified enough to argue, but I wouldn’t trust Durov. He’s a competitor, after all. And he has a history of questionable decisions.
This is a very good reminder why one should worry about the new messaging standard for interoperability.
WhatsApp users resilient enough not to fall for constant popups telling them to back up their chats can still be traced by a number of other tricks – from accessing their contacts’ backups to invisible encryption key changes [13]. The metadata generated by WhatsApp users – logs describing who chats with whom and when – is leaked to all kinds of agencies in large volumes by WhatsApp’s parent company [14].
It even might result in me thinking that we should have to ban facebook from entering the fediverse because people are lazy and don’t switch to the real fediverse if they can see your posts and contact you directly.
As it stands, Facebook can make unlimited, unauthenticated API calls to Lemmy and Mastodon right now… Blocking them only prevents their users from accessing the data.
Anybody who spins up a server basically gets instant access to that data from other instances, too. You don’t have to ask for permission. They just share it with you.
This is not about getting the data. This data is public.
It’s about market power
Both WhatsApp and Telegram suck. Just like any other messenger that’s either proprietary or not end to end encrypted. Signal is clearly the best choice.
Signal is not the best choice, it’s just a somewhat aceptable middle ground. I prefer something that doesn’t require a phone number and something you can self-host, like XMPP.
Good luck convincing normies to use some obscure messaging protocol. It’s difficult with Signal, even harder with Matrix, basically impossible with XMPP. 99.99999% have never in their life heard about XMPP. Also most mobile clients absolutely suck. You also can’t get proper push notifications without completely ruining your battery life. What a great choice!
I don’t see a big difference, the hardest thing by itself is convincing someone to install one more program or app. Also Conversations does not suck.
Conversations is only available on Android. And that’s the problem. You need different clients on different plattforms, etc. It’s just a mess. Some clients don’t support encryption and everything is just unnecessarily complicated, especially for new users. You can’t just tell someone “let’s chat on XMPP”. You need to explain to them what XMPP is, what app to download depending on what OS they use, tell them how to set everything up, etc, etc…
Signal is definitely not perfect, but it’s the best known private messenger and doesn’t compromise on privacy and security. It’s very simple to use, the setup process is basically the exact same as on WhatsApp or Telegram, it has good clients for every platform and they have operated safely with a great record for over 10 years.
I understand that other solutions might be better in theory, but if we keep suggesting a new obscure and hard to use messenger to noobs, they will never make the switch. In order to get more privacy for ourselves and the (potentially less technical) people we need to communicate with, let’s just get them to use something simple and private like Signal.
Yea, ive gotten pretty wide adoption from friends and family on Signal, but id love to have a comparable product with even more features/security/privacy
Matrix may get there eventually, but for now its Signal.
Agree
When it comes to clients being not fully compatible - I understand where there might be a problem, but I personally never encountered it. Conversations covers Android, and Gajim is on both Windows and Linux. In my experience, they work just fine with each other, and Android+Windows+Linux covers the majority.
I do use Signal with a few people who refused to use XMPP, but I’d disagree they have good clients for every platform. Because the desktop one essentially doesn’t work without a smartphone. Registering in something like Waydroid doesn’t allow binding a desktop client because it wants to scan a QR code, and Signal-Cli just didn’t work with binding a regular client. So I am stuck using the inconvenient Signal-cli, because the only alternative I saw so far would be using it on Waydroid, which is even less convenient. Not to mention that the client itself is on Electron.
You can get push notifications perfectly fine, they’re only a problem if you decide to avoid Google’s push servers.
Nobody is going to use XMPP but that won’t be necessary in the first place; MLS is moving in to become the new cross-messenger standard, but we’ll have to wait for MIMI to become standardised before we can properly use it.
Jami with unifiedPush notifications is a pretty good option
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You mean that XMPP protocol which is not encrypted by default? Oh yes you mean that.
XMPP would need to be redesigned from ground up as a secure and private messaging protocol to be a valid choice.
XMPP has it advantages but to many cry out that it is the savior when it is not. We need something better.
The major clients now do have OMEMO. Yea, I agree it’s flawed but that’s so far it’s the one I settled on. Do you know other, more refined selfhostable solutions? I am now looking for development there but doubt I’d get few people that I already got there to switch again.
Not aware that there is a modern decentralized secure and private chat protocol. Sadly. I also am not aware of any developmenta of something like that, so XMPP is the best we got (for decentralized open widly supported protocols)
I know that a lot of clients do encryption of the message body by default, but it still leaves a lot of stuff in plain text (afaik).
Guys, please stop using telegram if you care for your security and privacy
Telegram is not fully open source, sometimes they release the source, but the hashes of the builds don’t even match (so it’s a different source code) 🚩
Zero transparency about data handling, even when they get caught they don’t tell details 🚩 (Telegram in the recent years has got really shady reputation)
Very often ways they implement security is weird: non open source app, non open source server, leaking APIs, use of phone numbers, at some point they started asking for an email, non encrypted chats by default, never encrypted group chats… it can continue forever 🚩
Non-standard encryption is a real red flag, non-open-source 🚩
I know some people that work/worked for the police, and they can read all the messages easy peasy, i was trying to tell to the people many years ago, but everyone was so amused by the stickers. Now you can just read stories of the journalists and activists, and how they got imprisoned with the use telegram 👁️🗨️💀
PLEASE, STOP USING TELEGRAM IF YOU CARE FOR YOUR PRIVACY OR SECURITY
Durov is a suspicious RuSSian who very likely works for FSB. Do not use Telegram at all costs!
Crazy racism
