A couple years ago I was a part of a discussion about encrypted messaging.

• I was in the Signal camp - we needed it to be quick and easy to setup for users to get setup. Using existing phone numbers makes it easy.
• Others were in the Matrix camp - we need to start from scratch and make it distributed so no one organization is in control. We should definitely not tie it to phone numbers.

I was wrong.

Signal has been moving in the direction of adding PINs for some time because they realize the danger of relying on the phone number system. Signal just mandated PINs for everyone as part of that switch. Good for security? I really don't think so. They did it so you could recover some bits of "profile, settings, and who you’ve blocked".

Before PIN

If you lose your phone your profile is lost and all message data is lost too. When you get a new phone and install Signal your contacts are alerted that your Safety Number has changed - and should be re-validated.

After PIN

If you lost your phone you can use your PIN to recover some parts of your profile and other information. I am unsure if Safety Number still needs to be re-validated or not.

Your profile (or it's encryption key) is stored on at least 5 servers, but likely more. It's protected by secure value recovery.

There are many awesome components of this setup and it's clear that Signal wanted to make this as secure as possible. They wanted to make this a distributed setup so they don't even need to tbe only one hosting it. One of the key components is Intel's SGX which has several known attacks. I simply don't see the value in this and it means there is a new avenue of attack.

PIN Reuse

By mandating user chosen PINs, my guess is the great majority of users will reuse the PIN that encrypts their phone. Why? PINs are re-used a lot to start, but here is how the PIN deployment went for a lot of Signal users:

1. Get notification of new message
2. Click it to open Signal
3. Get Mandate to set a PIN before you can read the message!

That's horrible. That means people are in a rush to set a PIN to continue communicating. And now that rushed or reused PIN is stored in the cloud.

Hard to leave

They make it easy to get connections upgraded to secure, but their system to unregister when you uninstall has been down Since June 28th at least (tried last on July22nd). Without that, when you uninstall Signal it means:

• you might be texting someone and they respond back but you never receive the messages because they only go to Signal
• if someone you know joins Signal their messages will be automatically upgraded to Signal messages which you will never receive

Conclusion

In summary, Signal got people to hastily create or reuse PINs for minimal disclosed security benefits. There is a possibility that the push for mandatory cloud based PINS despite all of the pushback is that Signal knows of active attacks that these PINs would protect against. It likely would be related to using phone numbers.

I'm trying out the Element which uses the open Matrix network. I'm not actively encouraging others to join me, but just exploring the communities that exist there. It's already more featureful and supports more platforms than Signal ever did.

Maybe I missed something? Feel free to make a PR to add comments

Comments

kousu posted

In the XMPP world, Conversastions has been leading the charge to modernize XMPP, with an index of popular public groups (jabber.network) and a server validator. XMPP is mobile-battery friendly, and supports server-side logs wrapped in strong, multi-device encryption (in contrast to Signal, your keys never leave your devices!). Video calling even works now. It can interact with IRC and Riot (though the Riot bridge is less developed). There is a beautiful Windows client, a beautiful Linux client and a beautiful terminal client, two good Android clients, a beautiful web client which even supports video calling (and two others). It is easy to get an account from one of the many servers indexed here or here, or by looking through libreho.st. You can also set up your own with a little bit of reading. Snikket is building a one-click Slack-like personal-group server, with file-sharing, welcome channels and shared contacts, or you can integrate it with NextCloud. XMPP has solved a lot of problems over its long history, and might just outlast all the centralized services.

Bryan Reply

I totally forgot about XMPP, thanks for sharing!

What I've tried.

1. Firefox beta as a snap. (Definitely easy to install. But not as quick and harder to use for managing files - makes it's own Downloads directory, etc)
2. Firefox (stock) with custom AppArmor confinement. (Fun to do once, but the future is clearly using portals for file access, etc)
3. Firefox beta as a Flatpak.

I've now been running Firefox as a Flatpak for over 4 months and have not had any blocking issues.

Getting it installed

Flatpak - already installed on Fedora SilverBlue (comes with Firefox with some Fedora specific optimizations) and EndlessOS at least

Follow Quick Setup. This walks you through installing the Flatpak package as well as the Flathub repo. Now you could easily install Firefox with just 'flatpak install firefox' if you want the Stable Firefox.

To get the beta you need to add the Flathub Beta repo. You can just run:

sudo flatpak remote-add flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo

Then to install Firefox from it do (You can also choose to install as a user and not using sudo with the --user flag):

sudo flatpak install flathub-beta firefox

Once you run the above commend it will ask you which Firefox to install, install any dependencies, tell you the permissions it will use, and finally install.

Looking for matches…
Similar refs found for ‘firefox’ in remote ‘flathub-beta’ (system):

   1) app/org.mozilla.firefox/x86_64/stable
   2) app/org.mozilla.firefox/x86_64/beta

Which do you want to use (0 to abort)? [0-2]: 2
Required runtime for org.mozilla.firefox/x86_64/beta (runtime/org.freedesktop.Platform/x86_64/19.08) found in remote flathub
Do you want to install it? [Y/n]: y

org.mozilla.firefox permissions:
    ipc                          network       pcsc       pulseaudio       x11       devices       file access [1]       dbus access [2]
    system dbus access [3]

    [1] xdg-download
    [2] org.a11y.Bus, org.freedesktop.FileManager1, org.freedesktop.Notifications, org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver, org.gnome.SessionManager, org.gtk.vfs.*, org.mpris.MediaPlayer2.org.mozilla.firefox
    [3] org.freedesktop.NetworkManager


        ID                                             Branch            Op            Remote                  Download
 1. [—] org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.default            19.08             i             flathub                    56.1 MB / 89.1 MB
 2. [ ] org.freedesktop.Platform.Locale                19.08             i             flathub                 < 318.3 MB (partial)
 3. [ ] org.freedesktop.Platform.openh264              2.0               i             flathub                   < 1.5 MB
 4. [ ] org.gtk.Gtk3theme.Arc-Darker                   3.22              i             flathub                 < 145.9 kB
 5. [ ] org.freedesktop.Platform                       19.08             i             flathub                 < 238.5 MB
 6. [ ] org.mozilla.firefox.Locale                     beta              i             flathub-beta             < 48.3 MB (partial)
 7. [ ] org.mozilla.firefox                            beta              i             flathub-beta             < 79.1 MB

The first 5 dependencies downloaded are required by most applications and are shared, so the actual size of Firefox is more like 130MB.

Confinement

• You can't browsing for local files via browser file:/// (except for ~/Downloads). All local files need to be opened by Open File Dialogue which automatically adds the needed permissions.
• You can enable Wayland as well with 'sudo flatpak override --env=GDK_BACKEND=wayland org.mozilla.firefox (Wayland doesn't work with the NVidia driver and Gnome Shell in my setup though)

What Works?

Everything I want which includes in no particular order:

• Netflix (some older versions had issues with DRM IMU)
• WebGL (with my Nvidia card and proprietary driver. Flatpak installs the necessary bits to get it working based on your video card)
• It's speedy, it starts quick as I would normally expect
• Using the file browser for ANY file on my system. You can upload your private SSH keys if you really need to, but you need to explicitly select the file (and I'm not sure how you unshare it).
• Opening apps directly via Firefox (aka I download a PDF and I want it to open in Evince - this does use portals for confinement).
• Offline mode

What could use work?

• Some flatpak commands can figure out what just "Firefox" means, while others want the full org.mozilla.firefox
• If you want to run Firefox from the command line, you need to run it as org.mozilla.firefox. This is the same for all Flatpaks, although you can make an alias.
• It would be more convenient if Beta releases were part of the main Flathub (or advertised more)
• If you change your Downloads directory in Firefox, you have to update the permissions in Flatpak or else it won't allow it to work. If you do Save As.. it will work fine though.
• The flatpak permission-* commands lets you see what permissions are defined, but resetting or removing doesn't seem to actually work.

If you think you found a Flatpak specific Mozilla bug, the first place to look is Mozilla Bug #1278719 as many bugs are reported against this one bug for tracking purposes.

Comments

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First, I strongly recommend switching to Jitsi Meet:

• It's free
• It doesn't require you to sign up at all
• It's open source
• It's on the cutting edge of privacy and security features

Second, Anything else that runs in a browser instead of trying to get you to download an specific desktop application. Your browser protects you from many stupid things a company may try to do. Installing their app means you are at more risk. (Apps for phones is a different story.).

A small sampling of other web based options:

• Talky.io (also open source, no account required)
• 8x8.vc which is the company that sponsors Jitsi Meet. Their offering has more business options
• Whatever Google calls their video chat product this week (Duo, Hangouts, Meet).
• join.me
• Microsoft Skype (no signups or account required for a basic meeting!)
• whereby

There are many reasons not to choose Zoom.

😞😞😞

Finally, So you have to use Zoom?

Zoom actually supports joining a call with a web browser. They just don't promote it. Some things may not work as well but you get to keep more of your privacy and security.

1. On joining the meeting close the request to run a local app.
2. Click Launch Meeting in middle of screen.
3. Again close out of the request to open a local app
4. Ideally, you now get a join from browser, click that!

If it doesn't work try loading the site in another browser. First try Chrome (or those based on it - Brave/Opera) and then Firefox. It's possible that your organization may have disabled the join from web feature.

If you are a Zoom host or admin (why?) you can also ensure that the web feature is not disabled.