Signal was experiencing technical difficulties(status.signal.org) |
Signal was experiencing technical difficulties(status.signal.org) |
Stripe [0] and Segment [1] have pretty useful status pages, which provide, in my opinion, the real reason for a status page -- to confirm there isn't a problem on your end or that an issue you're facing is or isn't a problem with the service so you can escalate accordingly.
Some of its Signal-contrasting goals include:
* no phone numbers needed
* onion-routed messages
* multi-device sync
* no central point of failure
I also don't see anything in Session's materials that they're placing Intel™ SGX™ at key points in mandatory introduction/contact-uploading/cloud-backup steps – as Signal likes to do.
What difference does this make (genuine question)?
Intel controls the initial attestation keys – so you're dependent on their goodwill. Much of the world will view Intel as being as cheerfully compliant with US government requests, including undisclosed & arguably-illegal requests. (That's just like how some in the US view Huawei as being compliant in undisclosed ways with the Chinese government's requests.)
Sophisticated, high-budget/state-supported attackers may be able to compromise SGX units, via physical analysis/disassembly/reassembly. (This might happen before a unit is placed in service, or just show up to the outside as a temporary service outage.) So any secrecy/security features provided by their qualities could be a false promise.
Numerous flaws have been discovered, and more are likely to be discovered, in SGX. Try: https://www.google.com/search?q=SGX+flaws
Some security experts deeply distrust both SGX specifically, and the general idea that such a piece of hardware could provide the touted benefits against sufficiently-sophisticated attackers.
This is awesome.. Looks like its Australian as well.. even better!
But it does seem the Loki Foundation & Session project are attempting to engineer-around surveillance threats from local jurisdictions.
Oh well, had they're working on it.
The one drawback is chats aren't e2e encrypted by default, but there is an option to have "Secret Chats" which are e2e encrypted.
I've submitted multiple detailed support tickets with screenshots, steps to reproduce, etc, to no avail, never even got a response.
You can also set up automatic backups of conversations into an encrypted database. Certainly not a fix for whatever your problem is, but could be a workaround.
If most messaging systems were IRC, XMPP or Matrix then and the status quo was not that Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp were the most popular instant messaging solutions, then Signal being so centralised would look quite odd and we might have cause to criticise them.
The situation is not that, however we can still fault them for this.
I've been a Signal user on Desktop, iOS, and via the old chrome app for many years out of necessity, and I contantly encounter frustrating bugs that I've never seen on iMessage or WhatsApp.