Mastodawn

Is this really something new? If memory serves, Telegram has had it's own crypto since the beginning, and I don't remember anything about it ever being audited by... Well, anybody?

Granted, I don't know how MTProto actually works all that well, but IMO Telegram should've just used Noise or something. Would've saved them a lot of trouble. Although that doesn't really resolve the underlying problem that people think Telegram is secure when it's not (i.e., you have to explicitly enable E2EE and it's off by default), at least last time I checked. I haven't used telegram in years so my knowledge might be out of date though.

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dijit Oct 14

It was audited, found to have some serious flaws[0], then those were rectified.

Most people dislike Telegram because:

A) It takes away from Signals market share

B) They don't enable E2EE by default

C) They're owned by Pavel Durov, the Russian Zuckerberg.

I am aware that it's an unpopular opinion, but the FUD spread against Telegram and the hagiographies of Signal make me think something weird is going on.

Telegram has third party clients, so you can just roll your own client that runs another encryption on top if you want, like Pidgin used to do with OTR.

[0]: https://mtpsym.github.io

Security Analysis of Telegram (Symmetric Part)

Overview We performed a detailed security analysis of the encryption offered by the popular Telegram messaging platform. As a result of our analysis, we found several cryptographic weaknesses in the protocol, from technically trivial and easy to exploit to more advanced and of theoretical interest. For most users, the immediate risk is low, but these vulnerabilities highlight that Telegram fell short of the cryptographic guarantees enjoyed by other widely deployed cryptographic protocols such as TLS.

Security Analysis of Telegram (Symmetric Part)

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tptacek Oct 14

I like how you sandwiched "the encryption story is bad" between two irrelevant social claims.