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Technical analysis of the Signal clone used by Trump officials
- LordShredda 1y agoThe decision to use a signal knockoff was a planned and managed one, not just on a whim. Who's responsible for managing the phones?
- harrisrobin 1y ago[flagged]
- whatshisface 1y agoDon't speculate, the evidence is bad enough.
- namdnay 1y agoIt's not really a knockoff, it's a deliberately cracked version of a B2C app to adapt it to a corporate setting
- Zak 1y agoThe Signal client app is open source; it's probably not reasonable to describe a modified version as "cracked". Signal does discourage the use of modified clients for security reasons, but does not actively block most of them.
- mdhb 1y agoThe big part of this story which nobody is talking about is the fact that the app is literally controlled by a bunch of “former” Israeli intelligence officers. Who now have what is arguably the worlds most valuable access out of anyone.
- harrisrobin 1y ago[flagged]
- uxp100 1y ago> Israel’s grip on DC’s balls is far too strong I more or less agree. > We’re literally an occupied nation The language of the US under occupation is a neonazi talking point, ZOG (Zionist Occupation Government) being a phrase neonazi morons like. Maybe a coincidence.
- ObliviousLib 1y ago[flagged]
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- Tabular-Iceberg 1y agoI don't like the association any more than you, but what's the greater threat to the United States, the capture of its congress, administration and intelligence community by a foreign power, or a ragtag group of politically and culturally irrelevant LARPers?
- uxp100 1y agoHonestly, I don’t think either is a true threat to the United States. I think that while Israel has been hugely influential the past 30 years, and had a close relationship longer on the intelligence front, that is far different than capture and occupation. Israel’s influence has been awful for the people of Iraq, Iran and Palestine, among others, but I don’t just disagree with the phrasing of occupation, I disagree with the premise. A significant part of why Israel gets so much of what it wants is because many of those in power in the US over the past 30 years like the role it plays in Middle East politics. (I’ve been using 30 years due to feeling that HW Bush was stronger with Israel on the particular issue of Palestine, but really, not an expert here at all)
- jcgl 1y agoWhat are the visually distinguishing features of this TM SGNL app compared to the official one? To my eyes, the app in the Waltz picture looks the same as the official one.
- micahflee 1y agoIt says "Verify your TM SGNL PIN" instead of "Verify your Signal PIN". That's the only difference.
- dang 1y agoI appended a 'd' to the end of the title to pre-empt objections that they're not still using it. If it's known for sure that they are, we can de-'d' that bit. Edit: this subthread is obsolete now - I took a phrase from the author's update to the article to use as the title above.
- 1oooqooq 1y agohonest question, but you decided to go against the "don't change titles" rule to choose one unprovable point until another just as unprovable point is proven? it could be argued both ways with the same argument.
- dang 1y agoThere's no "don't change titles" rule, though it's interesting how the actual rule gets truncated to that in people's minds! Here's the actual rule: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html In this case I was thinking of both the 'misleading' and 'linkbait' bits of that 'unless'. (By the way, this is common HN moderation practice—bog standard, as I often say.) > to choose one unprovable point until another just as unprovable point is proven You might have a, er, provable point if that were the case! but I'm taking for granted that the officials in question did actually use this client, so "used" is known while "use" (which I took to mean "are still using") isn't yet known for sure. Did I miss something? Edit: btw, in case anyone's wondering why we left the submitted title up instead of reverting it to what the article says, one reason is that the submitted title struck me as arguably less linkbaity (and therefore ok under the rule) and the other reason is that we cut authors a bit of slack when they post their own work.
- 1oooqooq 1y agothe "use" assume nothing happened after the report (app still in managed domain). "used" assume an extra action taking place, which is a stretch imo. but i assumed wrong that you added the "d", not that you're only exempting the submitter title. thanks for the insight into your always nice moderation. follow up question: you work seven days a week??
- ComputerGuru 1y agoWhite House communications director previously revealed (after “Signalgate”) that Signal was an approved and whitelisted app for gov’t officials to have on work phones and even discuss top-secret matters on. But I haven’t heard that TeleMessage was approved (and I’d have serious questions if it were given the foreign intelligence factor). Anyone know if there is a clear answer to whether it’s been approved?
- ceejayoz 1y agoThe White House communications director lies continually, so the value of that statement is nil.
- dashundchen 1y ago[flagged]
- ceejayoz 1y agoShe’s the deputy. Steven Cheung is the director. Both people issue Baghdad Bob style statements.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- donnachangstein 1y agoThe correct answer is no one outside US Government IT knows for sure what is or isn't approved per their own rules. Every article (and comments therein) are just speculation and people trying to confirm their own biases, desperately looking for something to blame someone for, to produce more rage-bait and thus feed more ad clicks. Every single article is written with the presumption that there are no actual IT people in the White House, that someone wheeled in a Starlink dish on a dessert cart in the yard which is somehow running the entire government. It's silly and ridiculous.
- ceejayoz 1y ago
- voytec 1y ago> 404 Media journalist Joseph Cox published a story pointing out that Waltz was not using the official Signal app, but rather "an obscure and unofficial version of Signal that is designed to archive messages" Wow. And that's while their entire point of using Signal is to have conversations scrapped after a week to leave no no traces of criminal activity.
- tedunangst 1y agoI don't think it follows that they selected the archiving messenger because they wanted disappearing messages. The whole disappearing messages thing was just internet speculation.
- mingus88 1y agoThis TM SGNL app is compatible with legit Signal clients and servers. It’s also possible that they are using this app to archive chats that other parties _believe_ to be disappeared. In other words, set your chats to disappear in 5 minutes and convince your target to dish some sensitive info. They think it’s off the record, but it’s instantly archived
- nine_k 1y agoThe counterparty should be naive or stupid to think that whatever they send has no chance to be recorded forever. They should always assume otherwise. The only interesting use case of disappearing messages is that messages one receives will disappear securely, even if they forget about receiving such messages, or have no access to the device at the time.
- doctorpangloss 1y agoNaive or stupid? No way, not the counterparties of alcoholic media personalities.
- ceejayoz 1y agoWhether it was for that purpose or not, the messages did wind up disappearing. The CIA admitted it in a court filing. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/cia-director-leaked-chat.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/us/politics/cia-director-...
- spenvo 1y agoThere is new reporting that a hacker has breached the parent company, TeleMessage, including live data being passed across servers in production. https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-uses-was-hacked/ https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use... It was marked as a DUPE of this discussion, despite being a major new development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890034 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890034 Hopefully that decision can be reconsidered
- Mbwagava 1y agoHow does this happen when signal itself is open source?
- be_erik 1y agoThey used an internal fork delivered via MDM. There are no guarantees that Signal can make about the software running on those phones and per the reports it’s a lot of phones.
- baobun 1y agoThere seems to be a coordinated and consistent campaign to bury submissions from 404 Media on HN. Hopefully something can be done about that, too.
- viraptor 1y agoIn August last year I got this from dang when reporting a dead 404 link: "The site 404media.co is banned on HN because it has been the source of too many low-quality posts and because many (most?) of their articles are behind a signup wall." Not that I've really seen the low quality and the signup requirement doesn't stop other domains. There's quite a few things that originated from 404, so I hope HN gets over whatever it was that annoyed them originally.
- tomhow 1y agoThe main issue is the (sometimes) hard signup wall. I've been a moderator on HN for longer than 404media has existed, and I know from experience that this changes from time to time or article to article. Other paywalled sites that appear on HN (WSJ, NYT etc) have a porous paywall; you can (almost) always get around it by using an archive site like Archive.today. If it's a good article (contains significant new information and can be a topic of curious conversation) and a paywall workaround works for that article, we'll happily allow it.
- ryanwhitney 1y agohttps://archive.is/2025.05.04-225615/https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-uses-was-hacked/ https://archive.is/2025.05.04-225615/https://www.404media.co... Why are these being instantly marked as dead?
- dashundchen 1y agoAnything with a potentially negative impact on Musk, Trump or DOGE seems to get flagged immediately. Coordinated or not it extremely frustrating people flag rather than honestly engage.
- baobun 1y agoSeems to be a censorship campaign targeting 404 Media. Been going on for at least weeks.
- WalterGR 1y agoSubmissions from some domains aren’t prevented but automatically get deaded. It’s not a campaign. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43891088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43891088 in which a user reports that moderator dang said why that happens for this domain.
- croemer 1y agoThe fact that archive link works should make this eligible for unflagging. From tomhow (mod) > If it's a good article (contains significant new information and can be a topic of curious conversation) and a paywall workaround works for that article, we'll happily allow it.
- immibis 1y agoSounds like the definition of a censorship campaign, implemented by HN itself.
- watwut 1y ago[flagged]
- jimmydoe 1y agoWe should all feel relieved that trump admin are following law to archive their chats after all. Unfortunately this Israeli company is just incompetent, should try something from Russia next time, given that’s all the data end up to be anyway.
- 1oooqooq 1y agocutting the middle man is very neo lib of you. you may have a bright future in this administration. also keeping government honest and open is also very libertarian. covering all fronts.
- watwut 1y agoI am pretty sure China has some backups too.
- namdnay 1y agoI wonder if they were using it from the start, or if after the first SignalGate, someone scrmabled to find a supplier who could "make their Signal compliant" (which is exactly what TeleMessage/Smarsh are selling)
- awongh 1y agoAccording to this tweet the government contract for the software was originally from 8/24 during the Biden administration: https://x.com/_MG_/status/1918148557670105354 https://x.com/_MG_/status/1918148557670105354
- lynndotpy 1y agoCan you quote the contents of this tweet for those of us without Twitter accounts?
- immibis 1y agoJust replace x.com with xcancel.com
- mlyons1340 1y ago
- senectus1 1y agowhat is going on in the US gov IT? They took an Israeli app, that is a modified version of signal. the modification BREAKS the one thing signal is excellent at (keeping your messages encrypted so that only the desired endpoints can read them), then distributed it within the US Gov. This is insanity! US's enemy's couldn't manufacture a better result themselves!
- bathtub365 1y agoThe messages do need to be recorded in a way that can be read by people other than the intended recipients due to federal record keeping laws. I’m curious if this particular app has been in use for a long time within the government and only recently became a target after it was accidentally revealed in that cabinet meeting photo.
- namdnay 1y agoIt's not just the US gov - TeleMessage/Smarsh sell to everyone: banks, corporations etc. Their USP is that your employees get to "keep using their apps" but still comply with all the boring data retention stuff - instead of using a dedicated corporate chat app What's interesting is that they also sell a hacked version of WhatsApp, and the Meta legal team haven't steamrolled them yet
- GuinansEyebrows 1y ago> US's enemy's couldn't manufacture a better result themselves! in the game of nationalist geopolitics, it's only a matter of time before a current strategic ally becomes an enemy. it's the natural order of nationalism at global scale.
- smashah 1y ago[flagged]
- immibis 1y agoThey have a mandate to record conversations, so they modify the app to record conversations. I don't see the problem? This is much less illegal than the other explanation - that they were using Signal to avoid having conversations recorded. If you have a problem, you should have a problem with the mandate to record all conversations, not with installing a modified app to do it. If the person wasn't told this was happening, you should have a problem with that too, although who would accept a phone from the government and then not think it's tapped?
- be_erik 1y agoThis news story has been strange for me for awhile because on one hand NO our public officials should not be using Signal, but it isn’t because Signal is a bad technology choice. Signal is great. It’s probably the most useable service that’s verifiably secure.
- be_erik 1y agoInstalling Signal using this method provides none of the guarantees Signal can normally provide by being an open verifiable application. It not only opens you up to state actors, but also IT folks like us. This is very much tech news. It helps explain why MDM is both critically important for businesses and terrible for security.
- be_erik 1y agoThere’s chatter on bsky. But tl;dr anything said on those phones is assumed to be compromised until proven otherwise by time or a whole lot of very interesting security verifications. So far the evidence that this is a very large leak looks probable based on the evidence presented.
- croemer 1y agoWhy do you say "everything said on those phones" - did you mean "on this app"? If the backend of an app was compromised, that wouldn't mean the phone itself was rooted?
- be_erik 1y agoBy installing MDM you’re effectively chaining your security to the security of the MDM. The MDM gives you the ability to install arbitrary code via a blessed backdoor. There’s no reason currently not to suspect that anything said on that phone (signal or not) is compromised.
- croemer 1y agoThe MDM admin can do whatever the user can do (or more), sure. So yes the MDM admin can potentially read/hear/see stuff, but everyone knows that. That's not a vulnerability, that's by design. The compromise is only wrt the admin. Are you claiming the admin itself is compromised? What's the evidence for that?
- Zak 1y agoIt is reasonable to assume that the intelligence services of unfriendly countries are actively devoting significant resources to compromising both issued and personal phones of top-level officials in the US government. They would be negligent not to. It's also a good guess that those efforts would be increased after the first time it became public knowledge the officials were likely using those phones for secret official business. It is also reasonable to guess that such services have access to malware similar to the infamous Pegasus and a nonzero success rate at deploying it. In short, it's careless to assume none of the phones aren't rooted by a hostile actor. That's one of several reasons the government has rules requiring that classified conversations take place on specific approved devices which aren't used for anything else.
- lovelysoni03 1y ago[dead]
- abhisek 1y agoStill trying to grasp the idea of archiving messages from E2E encrypted communication system into a storage that entirely breaks the purpose of using something like Signal. It’s like encashing on the trust of Signal protocol, app while breaking its security model so that someone else can search through all messages. What am I missing here?
- RIMR 1y agoThere are compliance reasons where you want the communications encrypted in flight, but need them retained at rest for compliance reasons. Federal record keeping laws would otherwise prohibit the use of a service like Signal. I'm honestly impressed that the people involved actually took the extra effort for compliance when nothing else they did was above board...
- abhisek 1y ago> There are compliance reasons Makes sense. But still debatable if the compliance requirements are acting against the security model or perhaps there are biggest concerns here than just secure communication.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- actionfromafar 1y agoI would not assume the archives were meant for compliance and federal records.
- ceejayoz 1y agoWe also have no evidence it was in use back in March. It may be a response to that oops.
- Xylakant 1y agoYou can never control what I do on my device with the message received- I can make screenshots, or, if the app prevents that, take a picture of the screen. The goal of signal is trusted end-to-end encrypted communication. Device/Message security on either end is not in scope for Signals threat model.
- macrolime 1y agoSo this whole app exists because Signal doesn't have a way to archive messages on iPhone. Maybe they should take the hint and see that this is actually something a lot of people would find useful, instead of keeping it the backlog for a decade.
- WinstonSmith84 1y agoWell no, then you could just use Messenger or WhatsApp. The point of Signal is to be as secure as possible
- namdnay 1y agoTeleMessage/Smarsh also sell a cracked WhatsApp :)
- namdnay 1y agoIt's not a question of archiving on the device - it's a question of your employer being able to archive/monitor your conversations
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tomhow 1y agoSee also: "The Signal Clone the Trump Admin Uses Was Hacked" https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-uses-was-hacked/ https://www.404media.co/the-signal-clone-the-trump-admin-use...
- croemer 1y agohttps://archive.is/6J8mf https://archive.is/6J8mf
- dang 1y agoSee also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890179 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890179 for discussion of whether that article should count as a follow-up or SNI. Normally I wouldn't link to meta discussion but this was such a weird borderline case that I spent over an hour trying to figure it out. Maybe that makes it interesting. Edit: in case anyone's confused about the sequence here, micahflee posted the current thread 2 days ago. The timestamp at the top of this page is an artifact of us re-upping it (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20timestamps%20re-up&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
- matsemann 1y agoFWIW, I never clicked into this when I originally saw it because I'm not that interested in a "technical analysis", but gained interest when the other title said that the app was hacked. To me, that's worth discussing, but here that lede is a bit buried. And I now only know about it because a friend sent me the link. I do feel there's a pattern of me reading some interesting tech news, then thinking "wait, why didn't I see this discussed on HN?", to searching for it and finding a buried/flagged HN discussion due to it being somewhat tied to politics (what isn't?)
- myvoiceismypass 1y agoI have recently switched to the “active threads” feed which shows flagged content: https://news.ycombinator.com/active https://news.ycombinator.com/active
- jFriedensreich 1y agoHere is the thing about e2e encrypted messengers: They lock you and your data in and do not allow you control of your life. There is a right to data portability (at least in the eu) that they violate and there is no one fighting for it. Whenever i engage in conversation about this i get empty faces, hostility and vague references to features that are crippled or just don't work at all. There are people and institutions that have to archive the communication centrally and they don't have control over how they are contacted and cannot have conversation about the channel used in every interaction all the time. The solution is to finally force messengers to allow api access to all communication data and then show a sign similar to ssl warnings in browsers to the other side that this user is using an archival api service.
- woodruffw 1y agoI don't understand this: there's nothing intrinsic to e2e that makes interoperability particularly hard. There are multiple open-source e2e protocols that demonstrate this tidily, and my understanding is that there are governments in the EU that are adopting e.g. Matrix for this reason. > show a sign similar to ssl warnings in browsers to the other side that this user is using an archival api service. There is no sound way to do this and there probably never will be, especially if the protocol is interoperable and therefore the user can pick any client they please. The other client can always lie about what it's doing or circumvent detections through analogue means, e.g. pointing a camera at the screen.
- Analemma_ 1y agoIf you have interoperability, then you need cipher negotiation between clients with different capabilities (and they will always have different capabilities), and that's a huge, juicy attack surface. Multiple critical SSL/TLS CVEs-- including some we know for a fact the NSA relied on-- came from cipher negotiation.
- woodruffw 1y ago> If you have interoperability, then you need cipher negotiation between clients with different capabilities (and they will always have different capabilities), and that's a huge, juicy attack surface. Not really. The degree of malleability in cipher negotiation is widely considered to have been a Bad Move in SSL/TLS's early design, and modern (well-designed) cryptographic protocols don't enable the kinds of parametric malleability that made SSL/TLS so exploitable at the time. Signal's protocol, for example, is perfectly interoperable; the lack of interoperability comes from a (not unreasonable) constraint at the application layer, not the protocol itself. Another example would be MLS[1], which supports fixed suites rather than parametric malleability and uses the technique from RFC 8701[2] to prevent clients from getting clever and trying to add their own extensions that undermine the fixed suites. [1]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9420/ https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/rfc9420/ [2]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8701.html https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8701.html
- throw7 1y agoI thought the only client allowed on Signal was the official build provided by Signal itself? Does this mean Signal does officially allow another build (Telemark's TM SGNL) access to the Signal network?
- captn3m0 1y agoFrom what I know, Signal tries to block known bad clients. But guaranteeing such blocks is impossibly hard short of forcing attestations via things like SafetyNet that would legitimately impact users as well. There was a case where a teenager in India rose to news media popularity by publishing a messaging app, which was a simple rebranding of Signal he made using some other tool which patches assets iirc. It was blocked by Signal, but only after reports surfacing about it being an insecure rebrand.
- tomhowls 1y ago[dead]
- IshKebab 1y agoThat's correct, but presumably this is unpopular enough to fly under the radar (until now at least).
- Aachen 1y agoChina's WeChat certainly wouldn't like this yet there's a modified build of that as well, according to the article. I don't think they asked Signal Foundation for permission, they just did it. Just because you're an Israeli government contractor doesn't mean you can't get rich from piracy and modding so long as you find gullible buyers Also, how would Signal know this isn't the official app that's accessing their network? They do have a standing policy against it but if someone copy-pastes the APK and makes modifications in parts that don't talk to your server, how's your server to know that an illegitimate client is talking to it
- nelblu 1y agoThat is not true. There is a popular mod of Signal called Molly - https://molly.im/ https://molly.im/. It allows multi-device access, which I find very useful. I have been using this on Signal network for a long time now.
- jadayesnaamsi 1y agoMike should have used a GDPR-enabled app.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- thenewwazoo 1y ago[edit: apparently I responded to the wrong post. uh, oops. that's embarrassing.]
- dgellow 1y agoI would say, you maintain a blog where you demonstrate your skill and knowledge. As a side effect, I’m pretty lots of people here would be interested to read your debugging, design process, etc :)
- thenewwazoo 1y agoSorry I nuked my comment after realizing it was in the wrong article but I wanted to say I appreciate the response. I’m a decent writer (which is why I think I should probably get around to applying to 0xide) but finding time to blog with a full time job and a kid is hard. Not that that’s an excuse.
- dgellow 1y agoThat’s a decent excuse! Your time with your kid definitely takes priority :) Wishing you all, the best!
- ramesh31 1y agoMore and more I am starting to understand that making money with software really has nothing to do with quality. It's about checking boxes. Enterprise SSO? Check. Auditing? Check. Does it "kinda" do the thing as advertised? Sort of, poorly, and slower than many free open source offerings. Oh, and also the company is in talks for an acquisition, so the entire engineering team is just drawing up plans for their vacation homes and picking out their BMWs at this point, while the product rots. Doesn't matter, here's your eight figure contract so we can tell the SLT we did a thing. By the time enough people have had to deal with it to get rid of it, all the decision makers will have moved on to something else.
- quantadev 1y agoTo me the shocking thing about the USA Gov't is that they manage to lose trillions in the defense dept that they can't account for, but somehow are unable to develop their own communications apps? What? Signing messages with a crypto key takes like 4 lines of code. It's not rocket science. Yet they use some corporate app? My only theory is that they're pretending to have only 'Signal' so that when they want to they can allow hackers to "see" stuff they WANT to be seen. Like a disinformation honey pot designed to misdirect America's enemies. While they actually have a totally separate secret app that is secure and is developed by the NSA.
- mikrotikker 1y agoThere are 2 secure messaging apps in the US govt according to reporting. But I dunno maybe they didn't have emojis....
- quantadev 1y agoI heard they use "Signal" as an official app. That blew my mind. Sure they must have others, but why are they even allowed to use commercial apps at all? That's insane.
- MisterBastahrd 1y agoYou are severely overestimating the intelligence levels of the people currently occupying the halls of power in America.
- quantadev 1y agoI don't think the current administration came up with the idea of using Signal. However whatever team did was pretty "security illiterate" (to use a polite phrase), unless the NSA is secretly operating Signal from the inside. It's hard to know which is the case.
- cycomanic 1y agoThe bigger story is the follow up that shows someone already hacked telemessage because the app seems to be vulnerable to several exploits (and transmits data in the clear apparently). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43896138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43896138
- twobitshifter 1y agoI can’t read that full article, but are you saying the chats go e2e encrypted into signal and then come out non e2e when transmitting to the archive? That seems like an unlikely design for even an amateur. Why wouldn’t you just add something like an archive bot that sits in signal chats and sees everything e2e?
- taejo 1y agoIt seems TM SGNL also works when you're messaging with somebody using the genuine Signal app. They aren't gonna make a group chat with your archive bot to message you, and they might not be pleased when you add them to such a group chat.
- twobitshifter 1y agoMaybe but if that’s their opinion, I don’t think they’d be pleased to know that you are archiving their chats in any case. I guess it would depend on who the user base is.
- mmooss 1y agoIs Signal allowing arbitrary apps to connect to its network? How do I know that my correspondent is using TM Sgnl or another unofficial app? Doesn't that break Signal's security guarantees? For example, what if I set my message to delete in 1 hour but TM Sgnl archives it, or some other app simply ignores the retention setting? If Signal allows it, it seems like a major vulnerability? I suppose I must trust other users - they could always screenshot a conversation. But while I trust them not to intentionally cheat me, I shouldn't have to trust them to accurately evaluate the security implementation of a software application - something most people can't do, Mike Waltz being the most famous example. Maybe Signal should identify users unofficial clients. A downside is that it would provide significant identifying information - few people use unofficial apps.
- Sniffnoy 1y ago> Doesn't that break Signal's security guarantees? For example, what if I set my message to delete in 1 hour but TM Sgnl archives it, or some other app simply ignores the retention setting? Disappearing messages has never been a security guarantee of Signal. People can always archive things their own way (screenshots in the worst case). It's just a convenience feature, not a security thing.
- sudahtigabulan 1y agoI see responses like yours quite often. They are correct, of course, but if users keep getting confused about it, may be the UX is bad. People have been requesting various changes to this feature for years, but hear crickets from Signal.
- mmooss 1y ago> Disappearing messages has never been a security guarantee of Signal. What makes you say that? Has Signal posted something about it? Retention settings are widely used for messaging security. Also, I just used retention as an example. There could be many other holes in the unofficial client, including how it communicates with the Signal network. Maybe my messages aren't E2EE when communicating with that client. Maybe the mess up the encrytion implementation.
- CaptRon 1y agoKinda curious why meta isnt the one developing these government versions of messaging apps. Seems like a nice side biz
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- vonnik 1y agoOK, so now a foreign power has dirt on senior US officials as well as operational details about their plans. The first possibility leads to blackmail, the second to defeat, and both to scandal.
- smashah 1y agoAs far as I know, there is no mechanism in the US for this to be a scandal or a -gate, or for punitive accountability, due to the parties involved. It will be a bit of a story for a few days then swept under the rug based on precedent.
- ranger_danger 1y agoThey took down the source code page: https://www.telemessage.com/developer/api-libraries/ https://www.telemessage.com/developer/api-libraries/ Screenshot of previous version: https://0x0.st/8Jqf.png https://0x0.st/8Jqf.png
- gbraad 1y agoSpeculation, as no 'technical' analysis could be performed without access to the actual binaries. These aplications are unlisted and otherwise assigned to organisations using device management. This analysis is based on documentation and how this assignment process works. There is no way to determine if an original application got modified, as this would be the same for the WeChat, WhatsApp applications, or that they recompiled the open source version?
- zelon88 1y agoThere are images from the user's screen, with him on the photograph using the application, showing the chats from the app reproduced verbatim (forwarded) to a GMail account. The article states that "at least one line of code must've been added" to support such a feature, which I believe to be an honest and accurate assessment.
- gbraad 1y agoBut it is unknown if the current version was modified to do so. As the name "TM SGNL" looks shortened to fit after hex editing the app. This can all have been achieved by library overloads etc. > One line This can also be a single JMP and RTS statement, to a function that makes a screenshot, or something that takes the message. No technical analysis of a working application has been performed. Just speculation of how this could work. I am not saying Micah is wrong. I just hoped more was available, so an actual disassemble was possible. I would speculate that they did not recompile from source, but used the same process as used by the other applications. Intrusive by modification of the code execution, by injection, etc. That is speculation from my end, but reuses similar approaches across all of their applications.
- zelon88 1y agoIs this feigned incompetence. Perhaps a cry for help, or a calculated disclosure? I can't imagine anyone who would make the mistakes this guy makes, yet here he is; freely using his computer in clear view of a reporter with a camera.
- jay_kyburz 1y agoIts just what it appears. Occam's razor
- lrvick 1y agoYou have to archive messages in some sectors by law, fine. But taking an E2E encrypted app and decrypting and storing the messages in plain text is a brain dead solution. You get a group of people, say 5, and you generate a Shamirs Secret Split key requiring a minimum of 3 shares to recover, call it the archive key, with each share encrypted to one of those people. You have the modified apps encrypt chat logs every day to a new one time use key, and encrypt that to the Archive key, and upload the encrypted logs somewhere all can access. Now 3 people in that set of 5 people get a subpoena to disclose logs in a given time period. Each one can consent to using their archive key in an ephemeral secure enclave server to decrypt the daily log keys in the requested date ranged, and decrypt the requested logs. This way everything is end to end encrypted unless M-of-N people agree to decrypt specific archived logs to comply with a court order. This shit is not that hard and with the budget of the White House there are 0 excuses for not running a private server and end to end encrypted chat apps with reproducible builds using archive tactics along the lines I just described. But, I am also not mad at them making public fools of themselves either.
- randomcarbloke 1y agoenjoyed this but not sure how technical it is if you can't actually look at or disassemble the app in question.
- fredoliveira 1y agoYou can. The author made the source code of the app itself available: https://micahflee.com/heres-the-source-code-for-the-unofficial-signal-app-used-by-trump-officials/ https://micahflee.com/heres-the-source-code-for-the-unoffici...
- randomcarbloke 1y agooh a bigger analysis is inbound from the author! Excellent.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- WhereIsTheTruth 1y agoFun fact: https://x.com/wongmjane/status/1596615573303357440 https://x.com/wongmjane/status/1596615573303357440
- disintegracorn_ 1y ago[dead]
- ThinkBeat 1y agoI presume that there is an official application that has been created by the US military / NSA / some other entity to facilitate secure encrypted messaging for a presidential administration? If such a beast exists what is it called? How does it work? I would more expect it to be a specific combination of hardware physically approved phones and software. Did the prior administration use it exclusively? I remember Obama allegedly refusing to part with his Blackberry.
- alpha_squared 1y agoSCIF - Sensitive compartmented information facility. Officials are often not too far away from one (including in their own home), and can usually get to one in less than 5 minutes. From my understanding, the BlackBerry thing was largely for personal use.
- sharpshadow 1y agoFor classified communication there are SME-PED devices.
- ThinkBeat 1y agoFrom what I have read, the various secretaries have a "work" phone and a private phone. The work one is hardened and communicates on a secured government VPN system
- egberts1 1y agoWait, wait, wait. Did TM SGNL archived conversations at a central server for later dissemination in an decryptable manner at the central server?
- felishiagreen12 1y ago[flagged]
- leonardo41 1y ago[dead]
- rolandthomas 1y ago[dead]