p3x.deSignal no longer cooperating with Ukraine on Russian cyberthreats, official says
Sunshine (she/her)therecord.media/signal-no-longer-cooperating-wi…
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What exactly is Signal supposed to do here?
They're not supposed to be able to help in any way, how would they determine if a specific user is using Signal for phishing or whatever without decrypting their chats?
Being European would make zero difference here, unless the European service is backdoored.
Yay, signal is great because they do everything in their power to not only not spy on you, but not be able to. But boo, they are bad, because they won't spy on other people for us!
harcThis seems to be the only source for this information, while on the other hand I'm seeing this;
A Signal Update Fends Off a Phishing Technique Used in Russian Espionage
Google warns that hackers tied to Russia are tricking Ukrainian soldiers with fake QR codes for Signal group invites that let spies steal their messages. Signal has pushed out new safeguards.
People need to learn how E2EE (End to End Encryption) works. It's not that Signal refuses to cooperate with Ukraine, it's that they can't from technical reasons of E2EE.
Signal can't read or intercept messages, at best they can log IPs and that's about it. Which are useless if both parties are using VPN or other IP obfuscation methods.
It's same with ProtonMail for example. The most they can log are IPs, metadata and subjects that are visible to them. And that's it. They can't access or read messages unless they create backoors on login page that access users decrypted data locally. That's why creepy governments are so annoyed by encryption (looking at you UK you creeps as well as Australia and also Germany from recebt news and I didn't even mention ones like Russia...).
klu9The article is about a change in Signal's behaviour.
Before, Signal responded to Ukrainian authorities reaching out to about how the app is being abused by Russians, including for phishing attacks and account takeovers targeting Ukrainian users; now they don't.
Signal didn't introduce E2EE just last week.
VoyajerThe title indicates that Signal was cooperating with Ukraine in the past and decided to stop doing so. But that seems misleading if they were never able to cooperate in the first place?!
Edit: without more info on Signal’s previous responses, this article is not saying much.
“The encrypted messaging app Signal has stopped responding to requests from Ukrainian law enforcement regarding Russian cyberthreats, a Ukrainian official claimed”
A company can't be open source, software can.
Of that software requires significant infrastructure provided by a company you can't rely on the overall service. If not you self host or find community implementations.
There are plenty of untrustworthy Europeans as well, we should not uncritically switch to a European company.
noughtnautObviously Telegram is out, sadly Signal is also not exactly shining ... where else is there to go though?
Like another commenter here said, what did Signal do wrong in this case? We don't want a third party to be able to see our encrypted messages, or to know who it is who is using the service. Which is desirable when I'm using it, but undesirable when an aggressor is using it. Unfortunately you can't have one without the other.
Matrix and Threema come to my mind.
ZagorathI love the idea of Threema, but the reason I love it is also precisely why it's an extremely hard sell for casuals. Self-management of keys.
It's also not open source. Sure, the clients are, but the back-end isn't, and that arguably the most important piece.
BlazeDo people have success bringing their families and friends to Matrix? The Signal UI is closer to Whatsapp, which usually made the switch easier
Just gotta get rid of all your friends and family and then you can use any IM service. Very convenient.
I have brought my family to Threema and Signal (when Corona started). But Matrix would not work for them I fear.
What exactly is the cooperation that Signal was doing beforehand? Signal claims to collect very little data so I'm not sure how exactly they help?
Russia was caught running a bunch of side channel and phishing attacks using malicious QR codes. Presumably signal could help track these patterns in terms of time and place, to help isolate where espionage activity was occuring.
Except Signal should not have that data. They claim they do not log that information, so it should be impossible for them to do that.
Unless signal is lying, that's not something they can do.
Malicious QR codes were used to establish a separate device as a 'linked device' which would allow the attacker to receive and read Signal messages sent to and from the target
This tracks. Signal claims to have your phone number and logs on the last time that number accessed the service.
They could not generate new access codes via Twilio when certain patterns are detected and still be within that known data.
I would say yes, that you are not sure how exactly they help, if I'm answering your question as written.
First off, Signal hasn't said anything, this is an accusation made at a conference in Kyiv. So - who knows, they're behind, they don't have billions to support an army, who knows.
IF they have chosen to not help Ukraine where at all possible, that would be bad.
All of that said, if I was running a modern army using an encrypted chat app, I'd fucking have all that shit in-house, wtf. It's 2025. Ukraine already has a bunch of l337 h4X0rs. I'm sure they could slap something together in days and have it in the field in weeks.
not to mention the Signal protocol is open source so they could literally build something in days and ensure the same encryption
Maintaining and testing such an app has costs and risks. They may think it’s more secure that signal does this. It is also harder to attack all of signal.
They are also significantly resource constrained, everything they have goes towards defence. The effort building the app could be deployed on developing weapon systems they can’t buy.
Your right nations should have their own independent systems for secure communications for military, politicians and civil service.
Moreover, its not like Ukraine hasnt been pushing for localized tech stack since at least 2016-2018 ish.
Yeah they are slowly moving to matrix afaik
Really? Could you provide some sources? I'm curious to learn more.
Simplex is probably ready now. It's self-hostable, and has strong encryption.
I wish. SimpleX has a notification/delivery issue on iOS—it's not reliable at all over there.
Most Ukrainians are probably priced out from Apple products. I don't think iOS is a concern in their use case.
They have over 30% ios devices, for whatever reasons iphones are very popular in Ukraine.
What about android?
We make a lot of assumptions about how other people live, and what they have available.
Did it ever respond to those "requests"? What would Signal have anyway other than phone number to login association.
Call logs?
Nope, all they collect is date of registration and last time the client connected to the server. Has been proven in court.
Technically they can also store what I said, but yes, in fact it appears they don't.
So apparently some people think Signal can't see to which number they send that registration confirmation SMS.
Humanity isn't worth it, these apes are doomed.
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If they secretly kept that info and didn't release it, I guess that could be true. But do we have a reason to believe they're keeping that info?
This seems to be the only source for this information, while on the other hand I'm seeing this;
Wired: A Signal Update Fends Off a Phishing Technique Used in Russian Espionage
why aren't they using the matrix?
What's the difference in this context? Can't their enemies send dodgy links and QR codes on Matrix?
they can send anything, but if they run their own matrix on their own servers then the data stays in house.... important for govt or military things
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Yes.
Yes.
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The article explains everything. The gist is Russians are targeting Ukrainians with phishing attacks via Signal. There also is the suggestion they're exploiting the linked devices functionality, though I'm not sure how.
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I strongly suggest doing so if you want to understand what the article is about
Because they can't without backdooring the software? Just like they also refuse to co-operate with Swedish government and threatened to leave the market should Sweden try to force them.
You know Russian spies can also use TOR onion routing and so on.
As for phishing there is nothing Signal can do about someone scanning a signal contact sharing QR and adding it to their contracts list beyond informative "hey are you really sure, really really sure you want to add this contact". If user trusts someone they shouldn't, no amount of app policy protections help. Or maybe they manage to shish them to scan and approve "share account to another device". Again nothing Signal can do about that.
As long as there's a clear confirmation dialog.
Not sure. Might be political tension. Might be that phishing attacks are typically user error, and Signal feels like at a certain point it's not their responsibility. Hard to say beyond conjecture, and I didn't see a clear reason given in the article.
That's not how anything works
Give it time. Before long you'll see articles about how we need to ban encryption to help Ukraine fight Russia & Democrats will support it cause that is how clueless many of them are.
Dude fuck off.
Why? He's right...
Not even close, but okay.
While I personally think a removal of encryption tends be on the other side of this conflict, I have been called a nonce several times by otherwise leftist folks because of my support for strong encryption(ie the only people who want encryption have something to hide ergo you’re a nonce). This is all anecdote so YMMV.
bye bye signal just deleted it.
don't need to support a pro kremlin app
Hope you don't use (almost) any other messaging app either. If a single unsubstantiated article is enough to make you stop using something, you should be using almost nothing anywhere.
There's a whole ocean between 'a single (biased) source claims Signal have stopped responding to requests for cybercrime assistance' and 'Signal is a pro-Kremlin app'.
Ok, they had choice to use Jami, app independent of anyone, but they chose centralization...
The article is about Signal providing info on what the Russians are doing on the app and not Ukraine using it themselves
Did they really? I assume they would do more research than me when choosing tech, but my initial reaction is "the fuck is a Jami?". Is this a big app in recent years?
It's a messenger backed by the GNU foundation. The last time I tried it it didn't reliably deliver messages on Android.
And you're proud of that? Well, I'm glad someone else has found out about serverless, independent messenger.
Jami sucks. I will continue to have it installed and hope one day it evolves into a reliable instant messenger, but, currently, it's extremely unreliable. Not for times of war.
Not even good for sending memes to friends in peace time
Yup, he had some problems that are almost gone now. It's an obvious consequence of being completely serverless. But it provides independence. I transferred all my communication there, and frankly I'm surprised that everything works for many people I know. Signal doesn't. But Telegram and WhatsApp still does. For how long...
Not sure how you read pride into this at all, the implication is that if they don't know about it it's not a choice, while at the same time acknowledging that perhaps I'm just out of the loop.