I remember a time when visiting a website that opens a javacript dialog box asking for your name so the message “hi <name entered>” could be displayed was baulked at.
Why does signal want a phone number to register? Is there a better alternative?
One of the design goals is that they don’t have a user database, so governments etc can’t knock down their door demanding anything. By using phone numbers your “contacts” are not on their servers but local on your phone.
But your phone number is, and thus every agency can get your full name and address and location.
Yes but only yours. That’s still better and only having to knock on one door to get everything.
If I’m the target, then this is enough.
You are not the only person using Signal.
and then every phone number on your phone by arresting you and searching your phone.
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This sounds like it’s a problem no matter what method of communication you use, unless you keep no address book and memorize everything.
During registration they want a phone number to send a verification code. I know I am me. They don’t need to verify that.
They do. Otherwise anyone can register with your phone number and start messaging as if they were you.
If you want more privacy you’d need something like Simplex.
Signal’s internal identifiers are, of course, not phone numbers. And you can download their server and host it without requiring phone numbers for registration. Just they simply can’t afford it, they need to prevent bots from registering and sending messages somehow. A group message is stored in Signal as many times as there are group members, for example.
They need to verify using a phone number because otherwise other people could sign up using your phone number and pretend to be you? What?
They can only sign up using your phone number if they do require a phone number. If they didn’t ask for a phone number then how would people sign up using your phone number?
… but why require numbers in the first place.
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That’s WRONG they have a Database of every Phone number registered to them and metadata like the last time they logged in. You send all your contacts numbers to signal so they can respond who is also using Signal.
Because their founder (Marlinspike) is probably under a National Security Letter, maybe it’s just that, maybe he’s done some crimes they’re also holding over him. If you look at his behavior it’s that of someone very paranoid that they’re going to be found out to be cooperating with the feds and get hit with charges for not upholding the bargain, someone straddling one or two big lies that have to be maintained to keep their life going. Very controlling of things they should be open about if they care about privacy as they claim. But exactly the behavior of someone under an NSL who’s terrified of getting hit with charges for that and maybe other things but who is expected to front and run a purported privacy first messenger. The secrecy, the refusal to allow others to operate their own servers, the antagonism towards federation, the long periods without publishing source code updates.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that signal message content is compromised, the NSA primarily scrapes metadata and would most care about knowing who is talking to who and to put real names to those people and building graphs of networks of people. Other things like what times they talk can be inferred from upstream taps on signals servers without their knowledge or cooperation via traffic observation and correlation especially when paired with the fourteen eyes global intercept network. With a phone number it’s also a lot easier to pinpoint an exact device to hack using a cooperating (or hacked) telecom. Phone numbers can also be correlated to triangulated positions of devices, see who in a leftist protest network was A) heavily sending messages and B) attended that protest and left last and begin to infer things about structure and particular relationships.
And those saying it has to do with spam prevention, that’s kind of nonsense. First I still get the occasional spam, second a phone number that can receive a confirmation text is something all these criminal organizations have access to which the average person doesn’t. Third it’s possible to prevent spam just by looking for people (especially new accounts under 120 days old) sending very small amounts of messages (1-3) to a very large amount of other users especially in a short amount of time. Third there’s no reason to keep the phone number tied to the account, a confirmation text could be required with a promise to delete the phone number immediately after (would still be technically useful to the NSA though less useful for keeping track of people changing numbers or using a burner for this who might be higher value targets).
That is a pretty weird post that doesn’t make much sense, but I remember meeting Moxie and asking him about Android security and being surprised at how defensive he was about it. Is Signal the app he was working on? That helps somewhat. I get them confused with each other.
The Signal app doesn’t appear to be on F-droid, which is a bit discomforting.
I have never received spam on Signal.
I have exactly once as did a couple of my friends from the same stranger.
I got one one time, been using it for years. Fuckin’ weird to try on people who are privacy and security conscious. My guess is that they were attempting to see what numbers are using signal in the first place if someone responds with a “fuck off” then the spammer knows they use signal.
Secret sender invalidates your metadata argument
If you want to be mainstream a) you can’t have spammers, scammers, and all the other scum of the earth and b) finding your contacts in the app HAVE TO be plug and play. Literally no normie will bother adding with usernames or whatever.
finding your contacts
Wrong, it is not optional, does not stop spam and the worst way to try.
Do not let this derail us. Escaping to libre software is the best return on investment.
Do not let this derail us.
Nothing is derailing you personally. Why are you repeating this to others?
To avoid any misunderstanding discouraging others from using Signal over apps like WhatsApp, while commenting on areas where it could improve. Privacy has never been single player.
Maybe I am being too simplistic here. But I have never received a spam message to my XMPP account and I don’t know how a spammer would find it.
In a phone-based system a spammer can spam a list of numbers, or use contact lists that are easily shared via phone permissions. There are several low-effort discovery processes.
For e-mail, you get spam when you you input your personal e-mail into forms, websites, or post it publicly.
But for something like XMPP… It seems rather difficult to discover accounts effectively to spam them. And, if it is an actual problem, why not implement some kind of ‘identity swap’ that automatically transmits a new identity to approved contacts? A chat username does not need to be as static as an e-mail or a phone number for most people.
I just don’t see ‘spam’ as such a difficult challenge in this context, and not enough in my view to balance out requesting a phone number. Perhaps a spammer can chip-in?
as I see it, Signal tried to fit that privacy gap for a standard centralised messenger, if you think about it, that might have made it easier to non-tech-savvy people to adopt it (even if it was as a request from a contact), decentralisation is not remotely appealing to them
Wrong, they care what it does, not how it works.
Privacy: they know who you are but they don’t know what are you doing/when are you doing. Anonymity: they don’t know who you are.
It’s focused on ensuring there is no middleman between you and the other party, but it does not have a goal to provide anonymous messaging. Sadly.
no middleman
Signal is not P2P
No but it’s e2ee.
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End-to-end encryption have been designed so that a “middleman” such as Signal can’t read your conversation. Signal goes even further by encrypting metadata protecting other information such as who you’re talking too and at what time (some technical and targeted attack could however determined these).
In asymetrical cryptography we tend to assume that what we call middleman is a third-party placed between the two peers during the public key exchanges (such as handshake). Signal is indeed a middleman on the infrastructure level but the software has been designed to protect you from middlemen having access to the raw, unencrypted data.
That say if you don’t verify your peer’s public key it’s not impossible that someone has done a man-in-the-middle attack and that you’re sending message to him and he’s rerouting them to your peer, etc… However this is unrealistic for the average person.
So even if it’s not a p2p infrastructure but some centralized servers we can assume that there is no middleman thanks to e2ee.
You can’t just write three paragraphs (that contain half-truth, half-misinformation) about how Signal is the middleman and then conclude “you can assume there’s no middleman”. You can’t assume that. Signal is the middleman. There’s no arguments to be made against this. Signal doesn’t claim they aren’t the middleman either.
Do you know that using most P2P messenger you still rely on multiple ISP and big tech owned communication wire in order for your message to get delivered, even if there is no central server ?
What’s your point?
I am referring at man-in-the-middle attacks
Of course. Sorry, but I meant no middleman as in minifying the role of the server in your messahing. Signal’s goal is to ensure the server cannot have access to your messages and its only role is to receive and send data.
Signal IS the middleman.
THATS WRONG! Signal Server can just do a man in the middle as you try connecting to your contact for the first time. You need to verify the fingerprint manually which is not very obvious and present in the UI. In SimpleX.chat you automatically verify the fingerprint, as its the way to establish the chat to your contact and is included in the way you distribute the contact to you.
you will still need a phone number to sign up for Signal
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I see an option to change it, not delete. It’s still attached to a SIM card which requires identity verification in many states.
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I’m sure that just sets the database column
hide_phonenumberto TRUE.When anyone get a copy of your data, nothing will bring it back.
Because it’s centralized, I prefer SimpleX.
What an answers. Completely nonsense
Is there a quick explanation of what signal actually does? I don’t understand the need for a phone number either. Jami doesn’t ask for a phone number. It has other deficiencies that make me not want to use it, but those are technical rather than policy, more or less. Similarly, irc (I’m luddite enough to still be using it) doesn’t ask for a phone number either. So this is all suspicious. There are a bunch of other things like this too (Element, Matrix, etc.) that I haven’t looked into and tbh I don’t understand why they exist.
Signal is a messenger service. You can expire messages after a certain amount of time.
They ask for a phone number to limit bots. I used my Google voice number and it worked fine. I like Telegram which banned me after a day of use for using Google Voice.
I get that Signal is a messaging system (not sure if “messenger service” has a specific meaning). What I don’t understand is why I’d want to use it instead of any of the million others that are out there. I’ve never used Signal and don’t have the slightest clue about how it operates, but apparently it tries to mess with the contact list on your phone? That sounds bad. I use Nextcloud Chat sometimes and its web design is ugly, but it works ok and you can self-host it fairly easily. It doesn’t do anything with your phone contacts. Jami is distributed but (maybe unrelated) I often have trouble getting it to work at all.
It doesn’t “mess with your contacts”. You can choose to give contacts access if you wish to have secure contact discovery. Contacts are not uploaded.
It’s robustly encrypted and quantum secure, without metadata leaks like the sender of a message.
It’s recommended by Edward Snowden.
If you want to message someone, have the ability to verify there is no man in the middle attack, have perfect forward secrecy, very strong crypto, use open source software and still have all the conveniences of a modern message app, use signal.
CONTACTS ARE UPLOADED
Robust encryption isn’t useful if you don’t verify the fingerprint and signal makes that not intuitively.
SIGNAL CLIENT HAS UNFREE SOFTWARE INCLUDED
Contacts are never uploaded
Hashes of some numbers are if you enable contact discovery
Verifying keys is easy, what are you talking about?
Do you mean the client side is open source? What about the server? If you’re required to use Signal’s server, how do you know it’s not disclosing metadata? If you can self-host it, why the phone number?
The idea is you don’t need to trust the server
Messages sent don’t contain a readable sender field
Mobile numbers may not be necessary long term, architecture depends on accounts being created Witt phone numbers. Usernames were very recently introduced. Soon we may see requirement for phone number dropped, unless related to spam control
You trust the server if you don’t verify fingerprints. Signal makes that too difficult.
Sealed sender is a theater that you can enable but still have to trust Intel, aws and the signal server.
The wikipedia article looks informative and I will read through it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
Is spam a serious problem on other messaging systems?
I have received maybe 3 spam messages in many years of use
Spam is a huge problem on other messaging apps I have tried
It’s not suspicious. It’s been talked about for years. People know exactly what the phone number is used for. Easy discoverability, quick and seamless onboarding of new users by providing a way to bootstrap their social graph, and it being very similar to the process of the other biggest player that people just understand. And spam prevention. The phones are not leaked or used for anything else. The other alternatives exist and you are welcome to onboard the people you want onto them if you think it’s simpler.
The code is open, if you don’t trust other people and can’t read the code to understand then hire someone you trust to validate the claims and assure you. But spreading FUD and saying it’s suspicious is not productive to anyone.
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I don’t understand what you mean about discoverability: is my presence on the network advertised to strangers and spammers? That doesn’t sound good. What does the onboarding process look like?
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You still haven’t said what Signal’s advantages are supposed to be over alternatives, though I can guess some (e.g. better/more crypto than irc has). Jami seems conceptually ok, but buggy in implementation. Nextcloud Talk works but is kind of clunky. Matrix is popular though I’ve never used it: is it the main alternative to Signal these days? I thought it was what all the hipsters had migrated to while luddites like me were still on irc. Jitsi Meet looks nice though again I haven’t explored it much. I’ve been puzzled for a long time that there is so much work in this area yet everything has deficiencies. Are there difficult problems to solve?
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If Signal’s code is open then of course I’d want to self-host the server. Can I do that? Does that get in the way of the onboarding process you mention? Where does the phone number come in, in that case? If I to use Signal’s server, that doesn’t sound so open, and normally there’s no way for me to verify that it’s running the same code that they claim.
I don’t see where I’m spreading FUD. Ignoring a question and calling it FUD doesn’t invalidate the question.
- You can easily migrate everyone from WhatsApp to Signal and they don’t have to exchange usernames as most people have the phonenumbers in their contacts. (This has massive drawbacks addressed somewhere else, one lesser known fact is that they would have to verify fingerprints anyway to be sure they are speaking to the right person an not a proxy. Instead of that they could also exchange username+fingerprint initially, like Simplex does it.)
You can’t easily selfhost Signal. They engineered it purposefully to only run on Big Tech Clouds with specific Intel CPUs they put (too much) trust in.
Very interesting, thanks. Do you mean they use SGX (Intel’s buggy secure enclave feature)? Any idea what they use it for? If not SGX, do you know what the issue is? AMD Epyc processors have something similar but different, fwiw. If there is such highly secret info on the server though, that makes self-hosting even more important. It also makes the architecture suspect.
Yes SGX, they use it for sealed Sender, contact discovery and mobilecoin.
- Yes, kinda, if they have you in their contact books, they get a notification you joined.
Thanks. The more I think about it, the more this seems like outright evil behaviour on Signal’s part to pursue user growth, similar to Facebook etc. Imagine that you and your boss are in each other’s contacts for obvious work-related reasons. Do you really want Signal notifying your boss that you registered for Signal? For some of us it’s fine, but in general it seems like a terrible idea.
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To prevent spam and to allow people who already know each other’s number to easily contact over signal. If you want an anonymous account use an online sms activation service paid with monero, personally I recommend smspool.net .
Reduce spam bot accounts and other malware, as well as to allow for user discovery so you can find your contacts more easily. It’s not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.
It’s not designed to be an anonymous service, just a private one.
I think this needs to be said a lot more often and a lot louder. Anonymous and private are NOT necessarily the same thing, nor should the expectation be that they are. Both have a purpose.
in the end of the day, the end user needs an id. this is perfect for the everyday user, but obviously if you are writing anti regime articles, you might want to look around for more anonim apps.
perfect for the everyday user
…because of course, they don’t need privacy, do they now. “Nothing to hide” and all that jazz.
We have to assume we are all writing anti regime articles … In the future
Session is an alternative that does not require, or request, your phone number (or any other identifying information). Honestly, I have no idea why Signal got popular and Sessions did not. As soon as Signal asked for my phone number that set off alarm bells for me and I’ve never really trusted it since.
Isn’t Session the one with insane username strings?
Session is the one with broken security.
I don’t know that their security is “broken”. It may be, I don’t know. But also without anything that connects you to any particular message, it seems that – in itself – is a pretty good form of security.
I just don’t get why people accept Signal’s justification for requiring a phone number. They absolutely don’t need to (session proves that). It is certainly possible for them to say, “If you register without a phone number and access to your phone book then you will lose automatic discoverability by other users of Signal — meaning that you need to find another (physical) way to exchange your Signal username with your contacts”. They CAN do this. I think many users, like myself, would be fine with this tradeoff for greater anonymity. For some reason, they have steadfastly refused. The reasoning behind this refusal is what bothers me.
Yes. That was how they avoided using identifying information from their users.
So the reason Session never took off is probably because exchanging contact information is a big hassle, effectively barring users looking for convenience?
No, it had and has other problems
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Thanks for this link but your username also makes this pretty sus. 😜
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Ya. It was a joke.
This is incredibly important. Signal is considered the “gold standard” of encrypted and private communication for a reason.
