this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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[–] [email protected] 29 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Signal is a publicly available app that provides encrypted communications, but it can be hacked.

As far as I've seen, the only attacks are phishing attacks to get a device linked

This is far from being hack-able in my books.

Did I miss something?

I'm not defending those dipshits, but I want to make sure, that my preferred communication platform isn't actually compromised

[–] [email protected] 20 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

What’s being reported… is that the national security folks believe that most all top level officials already have enemy nation states ease dropping on their personal phones. Especially if, say… you’re in their country (like one of the members of the signal chat was, in Russia specifically, during the signal chat episode).

Signal may be safe for us normies, but if your device is already compromised because you’re a high value target, especially if you’re in their lair, then there isn’t much good that’ll do for you.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yeah, if you device is compromised, the apps on it are obviously as well.

But that still doesn't affect Signal as a network directly.
Which is imho a important distinction, as else all my communications could be compromised as well

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

Media won’t report that, it’s be bad for the shareholders of iOS or Android was known to be exploited. They’ll just say “Signal bad! Signal insecure!” While these dipshits probably have given GIF Keyboard access within it and shit like that.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Phishing and also your commercial phone is definitely vulnerable. Look what groups like Salt Typhoon and their cohorts have been doing for years.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Not saying that this isn't a threat vector, but it's not like my communications are automatically compromised, like with a bug or hacked signal server infrastructure

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

For sure, but the primary reason governments around the world keep their classified data off commercial networks is to mitigate risk vectors. The US is just being led by a bunch of fucking morons, so they don't consider things like that. The encryption within Signal is perfectly sound, but top secret data has no business being on their servers or on unclassified, commercial phones.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Hacking a signal server should yield zero useful results. Messages are encrypted on the phone before being sent. Signal servers only ever receive and retransmit encrypted blobs, never the plaintext. They, by design, do not have the keys to decrypt those messages. There might be metadata about who messages who and when, but I’m not 100% familiar with that part of it.

Now, if you pwn the phone, on the other hand, you can record the display and log the keystrokes.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, exactly

But when they talk, that signal is hackable, there is pretty much a difference to a phishing attack or an actual hack of the infrastructure

And as you said, with E2E encryption that shouldn't be really possible

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

Did I miss something?

Yeah the NSA (and your other favorite cyber/sigint agencies) will just use the easiest attack vector of your phone, which is usually iOS, Android and its many other apps, root it and read all your app messages anyway.

I mean that assumes you are a target of high value worth throwing stuff like the Pegasus spyware at, but at that point you really should just be using a dedicated handheld computer with a sim adapter for network connectivity, and not practically almost every smartphone on the planet, even if you somehow coaxed it to use postmarket OS lol.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

did I miss something?

Yeah, your devices keyboard needs an internet connection.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

As far as I know, I've blocked my keyboards network requests

But maybe GrapheneOS gives me more abilities here