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Time to get serious with E2E encrypted messaging
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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The biggest issue with Matrix is that the server collects ALL the metadata. If that's your server, that's fine. If thats the default matrix.org server that almost everyone uses, you might as well be using WhatsApp. Same thing goes if any of those people are conversing with people on your server, as they will store all redundant metadata on their server as well.
Signal is easier to use, more private, and faster.
Signal requires a phone number on setup.
Also, matrix has bridges, which alone make it worthwhile for me. They, of course, don't help privacy, but they are so so nice for convenience.
Matrix is definitely slow though, and a grand majority of the clients are heavy terrible buggy electron apps. There are a few good ones ( nheko and the new beeper clients ), but even they have some rough edges.
I still use matrix all the time and love it.
If max privacy was the goal I think simplex looks wonderful. No required info for sign up, no way for them to possibly collect any metadata ( because there are no identifiers sent over internet for anyone at all ), E2EE, and decentralized.
I’ve been trying SimpleX a little this week. It hasn’t been great, unfortunately. It could be an iOS issue, but notifications aren’t coming through. Maybe Android will be better.
On iOS, I had best experience using element X, so far
I absolutely love Element X. Synapse has been low maintenance to self-host, as well. Win-win.
It is dumb and annoying and inconvenient but doesn't affect its use or privacy.
I do agree that SimpleX seems like the best chat option.
It creates a cost for spammers. They have to have an account with a Telco, which isn't free, which in a lot of countries comes with some sort of National ID to register. That's the reason.
Lol, let me introduce you to http://smspva.com/
No they don't, you can sign up with a VoIP provider.
It affects its use for me definitely. I don't want to have a phone number. At all.
How do you even exist without a phone number. How do you get cellular data? Does the government not require you to have one? Your employer? What about all the services that require one?
To be clear, I have a phone number, but I do not WANT to have one. Most aspects of my life I have removed my phone number from. There are still a few services ( like signal! ) which requires one, and I cope. Cellular data is also something worth avoiding, from a privacy perspective. It is very possible to live a life where you're never very far from wifi, especially in a city. I do not currently do this, but would love to one day.
How is public wifi more secure than mobile internet?
For both, you need minimum a VPN connection outha there (to your home ideally, where you are in control of filters etc.) to get some privacy.
Mobile data you pay a service provider for and link all of your information to ( address, name, etc ), and can be used by one company to track your location at any time with very high accuracy as long as you are near 3 cell towers. Public wifi gets no information about you other than your MAC address and that you're currently within it's range. There is no central body that can track all your movements. You could, theoretically, buy prepaid data plans to minimize the info they know about you, but then you have to buy a new one each month, and there's STILL one company tracking all your movements each month, though they don't really know who YOU are. They could still do traffic analysis to figure that out.
It's not that it's less secure, it's that it's worse for privacy.
Also, messaging over SMS / MMS is awful for security, which I lump in with the rest of this conversation. https://youtu.be/wVyu7NB7W6Y
I have to wonder if you could use a burner number and just disable it after setting up your username
I have created a telegram account like that. No username. The number does not exist anymore. It's been working as intended for the past 6 years or so.
I think you'd have a theoretical issue if the next person who got that number also tried to set up a signal account.
You might be right. I'll have to go double check, but I don't think that you can just set up a new account with the same number without the password you set up.
I might be wrong, though.
You can enable a registration lock, where anyone with your number would have to enter a pin to register an account with it. However, it removes itself if you don't log in for a while.
Yep, that's what I was thinking of. I guess just set a reminder to login every now and then (if you don't use regularly).
Sure but it allows VOIP numbers. I'm using a jmp.chat number with it just fine.
Good to know!
Is the phone number required for 2fa codes or anything like that at any point ?
I got an initial verification code and haven't heard from signal since. Signal doesn't support totp or SMS 2fa. But has a pin code set along with your password. A new device that is added doesn't have access to old messages unless you have the correct seed key iirc
Not anymore.
You can choose to share a username instead of a phone number, but they still require the phone number at setup iirc.
True.
Then your point…?
Yes it does
You're right. Only for setup though, which is something I guess.
Unfortunately, it is also effectively tied to Google services due its app distribution and push notification channels on Android (which most people on Signal use), and as a centralised service, it is vulnerable to shutdown or network-level metadata monitoring by anyone with sufficient access/influence at Signal or their data center provider (such as a government who doesn't like encrypted messaging).
~(Edit:~ ~rephrased~ ~for~ ~clarity)~
You can use Molly, a fork of Signal for android. It offers an alternative for push notifications.
Yep, I run my own mollysocket + ntfy server.
Essentially, molly socket functions as another device, when it recieves a notif, it pings your specified unified push server, which then queues up a notification for the ntfy app on your device.
You don't need to run your own unified push server, and can just use one of the main ones, but I figured I might as well.
I personally have them hosted on fly.io for free via the legacy hobby plan.
Now all I need to do is get more of my friends to message me on it 🤣
Here's the link for anyone who's interested: https://github.com/pcrockett/mollysocket-fly
Huh I didn't know this existed. Will compare it to mine later
Oh that's the only one I know of. I thought that this is what you're referring to.
Nah I rolled my own and didn't publish it so that's probably why haha.
Have you been using this one?
~~On my app I don't get rich notifications only "you may have a new message". Havent looked into it at all though, only set this up like last week~~
Lol there is a setting in molly itself for rich notifs
I tried it out once, but I currently don't use it, because I just run mollysocket on my own server.
That should only be the case while your Molly database is locked, because the actual messages can't be decrypted, so no message preview can be shown in the notification.
It's been recently added to FDroid.
You can use NTFY with Molly (which has been on FDroid for some time).
This one is just a straight-up lie. Everything on the server is encrypted and no one has the keys except the participants.
No, it has not. A third party published it in an f-droid compatible repository. That might be convenient for someone who happens to trust that third party and manually add it to their F-Droid client, but it is not at all like it being added it to F-Droid.
This does not refute what I wrote. Unless you only communicate with people who get their Signal app from some non-Google source and they all rig up alternative push notification channels, or every one of them uses Signal exclusively on iOS, your conversations are still tied to Google. Perhaps you have so few contacts that you could achieve that, but most people are not in that position.
Encryption doesn't hide network traffic. Signal's centralised design means there is a single point where that traffic can be monitored and traced to reveal which endpoints are talking to each other, and where, and when.
What I wrote is not a lie, which you would know if you actually understood these issues. Please stop making baseless accusations. You are wrong, and you are being very rude.
If you're interested in correcting your ignorance, I suggest starting with this paper, which touches on some of the issues:
https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/improving-signals-sealed-sender/
If the paper is too much for you, the linked video does a pretty good job of explaining.
Their github releases have the apk available so you can manually download it and install it or use obtainium.
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/releases
It's also available on their website btw: https://signal.org/android/apk/
That's simply false. Signal Notifications never include the content of the message or any metadata, no matter if they're sent over FCM, APN, WebSockets or UnifiedPush (via mollysocket). That wouldn't even be possible, since the Signal server sending out the notification doesn't even have the key to decrypt the message. Only the users involved in the conversation have the keys, that's how end-to-end encryption works. Signal simply sends an empty message via FCM (or any other push system), and the Signal app on your device then receives and decrypts the encrypted message and shows you a preview of the message content as a notification on your operating system.
And every build of the Signal client for WhatsApp also supports WebSockets as a fallback push notification system, in case Play services aren't installed or can't be reached. The only reason why FCM is used by default is that it saves some battery, because it only maintains one background network connection for all apps, instead of each app handling notifications themselves.
It's not false.
Signal's default, well-supported installations use Google services, so unless you're an extremely atypical user, those services are present on most of your contacts' devices. You might have the knowledge, skill, and motivation to remove those services from your own device, but since they're still present at the other end of most chats, you haven't escaped them.
Let's also remember that E2EE doesn't protect the endpionts, and that Google Play Services run with system-level privileges.
I would be more concerned about how phone-oriented it is. A phone's default OS is such spyware that I am not sure just what is safe from from being uploaded. And even if the person wants a more private alternative, most phones have locked bootloaders. On the other hand, Linux would run on damn near anything... But using Signal on it without a smartphone is very annoying. No way my mom would understand an Android VM or a command-line client, because the desktop client isn't feature-full and doesn't even allow registration.