What do you think about Session as a potential replacement for Signal?
(getsession.org)
from zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 24 Feb 14:28
https://lemmy.ml/post/26405514
from zdhzm2pgp@lemmy.ml to privacy@lemmy.ml on 24 Feb 14:28
https://lemmy.ml/post/26405514
Especially for the less tech-savvy among us?
threaded - newest
Really bad idea, session copied signal, stripped out forward secrecy, and uses centralized file transfer servers.
eylenburg.github.io/im_comparison.htm
This link has a helpful graphic, thank you! šš
Thereās nothing about Signal that requires savvines.
They probably meant tech-savviness compared to other Signal alternatives.
Although even then XMPP with modern clients is simple enough for my mom to use, so I donāt entirely buy the ācomplicationā argument either.
The bar is so low. I just had to visit somebody today to help them fix their computer. There was dirt on the fingerprint reader, and they forgot their password. I told them their password was their user name. I.e. hunter / hunter and it didnāt workā¦ (I chose this because of their modest tech experience)
They were using hunter / Hunter instead.
Idk, I meant my personal experience. She doesnāt see much difference between ease of use of her XMPP client compared to, say, Whatsapp.
I think that SimpleX is more innovative and ground-breaking than Session.
Grr! Ok, but damned if I could get that to work! It seems like you canāt use the desktop and mobile client at the same time! You have to scan a QR code to switch between them! And it has issues with firewalls and VPNs! Old and clueless here, maybe part of the problem. š
No issues with fireballs and VPNs for me.
I didnāt have an issue with fireballs either, thankfully, because I made my saving throws before they got to me.š„š
Yes SimpleX isnāt mature from a UX perspective and that is due to itās innovative approach. If you need to have device sync and donāt want Signal, Session could be a better optioon to you.
Am I right tho about having to scan QR codes to go back and forth between desktop and mobile on SimpleX, or am I just šµāš«?
I donāt use SimpleX on my computers
I just have two identical but independent profiles. They also double as my remote copypaste buffer.
Use separate profile for different devices. Make a group when you chat with others.
But itās a difficult concept for the average person to not have an account, but everything is device oriented. Same problem with people not using gpg for email. Having to maintain a thing similar to a private key thatās not memorizable like a username and password and back that up in case your device is lost. Is a big hurdle for many. And then additionally having to share a qr code or link through some external means for someone to connect with you rather than just telling them to download an app and enter your username HSS always been difficult.
So, IMHO, Signal has the best implementation possible with the level of usability that many nontechnical people expect in a chat application, even if itās not the most secure. I am interested to see how SimpleX solves these issues in the future, though.
Of course it is, thatās the innovating part of it ! My opinion was that I rather use SimpleX if I wanted to switch away from Signal, if not Iāll simply use Signal not Session. But my threat model isnāt everyoneās.
I think as people will be more educated on cryptography in there digital lives we will have better UX to the point of it not be as difficult as sending on e-mail in the late 80s. Innovation like Bitcoin, nostr, U2F, passkeys etcā¦ will be more accessible over time. Today sending a message on Signal is infinity more easy, secure and private than the majority of e-mails of the 21th century.
Yeah, I just meant people are used to decades of using meaningful usernames. Having to use a cryptographic key has traditionally made it very difficult to get enough people to adopt to make it worth adopting yourself as a technologically savvy person. I never would have used Facebook in a million years if it wasnāt for the fact that it was the only place I could get in touch with many people. Having to build your networks in-person is tedious for many people and sharing the codes securely through other means is cumbersome if you donāt have an existing method for sharing.
Just like HTTPS needs several layers to make it work and still relies on an untrustworthy and corruptible thing like DNS to verify the destination and itās keys are the thing youāre expecting to connect to. Thereās no secure way to share the route to your device electronically in a user-accountless system with no secure, trusted middleman translating names to addresses unless you do it in-person.
The main turnoff for me is that it is essentially impossible to selfhost - you use random nodes from the network, and to host such a node, you have to lock up a whole fortune (last time I looked I remember it being around $1500, mightāve changed) in their own cryptocurrency. They do promise returns, but I am skeptical - where would they take so much money to guarantee compensation for everyone within a sane amount of time? They claim it is against a Sybil attack, but it seems to me that it would be a lot easier for a government/company to have more nodes in a situation when ācompetitionā is reduced like this.
Selfhosting is kind of hard and labor intensive for some of us; had a lot of trouble trying to set up NextCloud on my QNAP (if that counts as selfhosting), and finally gave up.
Fair - I was referring to the fact that here it isnāt even an option.
Also, XMPP or Simplex are very easy to set up, Nextcloud is indeed more complicated.
As a centralized system, nothing has been shown to improve on Signal yet. For decentralized systems, I havenāt seen anything better than Matrix yet? SimpleX is slightly more secure, but harder to spin up and easier to break.
Sessionā¦ there have been multiple articles written on how it is flawed and untrustworthy.
Matrix is not decentralized but rather federated and distributed. Also synapse (matrix sevrer) have poor performance, especially when you federate your instance to others.
What do you mean poor performance ?
My synapse used to run on a 5ā¬/mo VPS besides other stuff and ran fine and now runs on one of my on-premise servers (and not even my fastest, just some old ryzen 2700) with A BUNCH of other stuff besides it. Multiple users, a bunch of large federated rooms, bridges to other messengers ā¦ And it just runs fine with 0 issues.
Are you talking about running a synapse server for like a thousand people or on absolute potato hardware or what is the issue ?
Iām not running a Synapse server myself so I can only speak on behalf of people I know who are. From what they told me they love the matrix protocol but itās not the same for the synapse implementation. A non-federated server can have somewhat great performance but a federated one was not worth it for them so they decided to switch to another alternative. They are not running for thousands of users more something like 40 I would say and while I donāt know their server specs, I assume itās not a potato though.
āHarder to spin upā? Hard disagree. Matrixās main server implementation is very resource-heavy, and alternatives like Conduit are not full-featured (and broke in some ways for me when interacting with mateix dot org). Meanwhile Simplex servers are pretty light and aside from a couple errors in the documentation that took a while to figure out, it has been easier than Conduit. And unlike Matrix, it has never broken for me so far.
firstly , why do you want to replace Signal?
It is a centralized weak point that US feds can easily extract meta data from to obtain your social network etc
Thatās a pretty big claim to make with zero additional information.
Since 2018, Signal has been encrypting the sender data with a key that isnāt known to the server. Messages do not contain unencrypted metadata. Iām not sure how you expect the FBI to do this with the information available to the Signal servers.
at role does the signal server play?
If this is a question that you need answered then Iām
notsure youāre qualified to declare that Signal is insecure.I am pretty sure that if asked, the serverside protections can be circumvented - I think in one Github issue they even confessed that Sealed Sender is not bulletproof and is ābest effortā. I prefer to assume that if everything goes through a single server, and they know what and when each account does upon connecting - they can correlate the identities if they want to.
No, they literally cannot. The entire protocol is open sourced and has been audited many times over.
One of the fundamental things you assume when designing a cryptosystem is that the communication link between two parties is monitored. The server mostly exists as a tool to frustrate efforts by attackers that have network dominance (i.e. secret police in oppressive regimes) by not allowing signals intelligence to extract a social graph. All this hypothetical attacker can see is that everyone talks to a server so they canāt know which two people are communicating.
The previous iteration, TextSecure, used SMS. Your cellular provider could easily know WHO you were talking to and WHEN each message was sent. So SMS was replaced with a server and the protocol was amended so that even the server has no way of gaining access to that information.
The sealed sender feature is something that the client does. It was best effort because, at the time, they still supported older clients and needed backwards compatibility. This is no longer the case.
A bigger weak point is having weak encryption like Session has. Also, you cannot obtain metadata from Signal. Theyāve gone to great length to prevent that. Signal servers donāt even know who is talking to whom.
Because his grandma canāt type a password 30 characters long just to restore her messages.
They are so smart and still make some choices that are so, so, *so dumb*. āNo history on a new PC for you, itās a דfeatureדā. Seriously? cāmon.
History isnāt stored on the server so it canāt be automatically populated on a new device. That is a feature. The alternative, storing the messages on the server or having the means for one device to clone all of its messages to another device, would be insecure.
A 30 character long password is required in order to have enough bits of entropy so that the backed up messages are actually secure.
Grandma isnāt moving her data to a new PC without assistance, the person that is assisting her should be competent enough to operate Signal.
Sure, so let me export my data from another PC or phone. If they wanted you to have message history, they would. So Iāll respectfully disagree.
Why can she do WhatsApp but no Signal?
Itās already needing to convince people to use Signal, why also making it hard for, letās say, your grandma.
ā¦miraheze.org/ā¦/How_to_move_Signal_Desktop_messagā¦
I use Matrix and this is possible via several encryption keys. They just probably cba. How Matrix E2EE works
The real alternative to Signal for myself is SimpleX. The project is still in his beginning but itās the best instant messaging we could have once polished finished
Dear god, just donāt.
soatok.blog/2025/ā¦/dont-use-session-signal-fork/
As soon as I saw the furry reaction images, I knew this was going to be a detailed and informative blog post.
By the same author about Signal
Wasnāt this the blog who also got a response from session asking for a PoC and then they replied with (paraphrasing) āwell itās not my job to provide oneā?
So everything in that blog post is theoretical at best?
Briar doesnāt even use a central server, all connections go through tor
Briar doesnāt make sense to me because youāre trading a central server for a central serviceā¦ If tor is down, you canāt message. Itās the same POF as cellular, which is insane to me.
tor is decentralized, if someoneās tor server goes down you just go to another.
Youāre missing the point. Of course tor is decentralized, but the tor protocol can be locked at which time you have no connectivity at allā¦ Your super secure messenger doesnāt work. It makes no sense.
āthe tor protocol can be lockedā ?
Unless you obfuscate tor traffic, itās trivial to block it via any number of IDS products. The entirety of public tor exit nodes are publicly available: check.torproject.org/torbulkexitlist
Hereās tor exit node blocking in production with 14 lines of bashā¦
Itās significantly easier than youāve obviously been led to believe. When it becomes not easy is when someone understands the protocol and understands how to circumvent these measures, but I can assure you that 99.8% of all tor users donāt fall within that categoryā¦
oh sure, but you can get around these blocks and this sort of block is ultimately always a possibility short of building your own network infrastructure. and as blocks like that become more common it becomes more common to circumvent them too.
āsignificantly harder than youve been lead to believeā, no, you just werent clear in your description of the problem. if your problem with tor is āgovernments can play whack-a-mole blocking ips and trafficā there is no technology which doesnt have that as a downside.
They create a better ad, so they create a better adblock, which forces them to discover anti-adblock methods, which forces adblockerās to adapt, which forces anti-adblockerās to adapt, ad infinitum.
This isnāt anything new. Of course you can circumvent these blocks, but they can always adapt to make them useful again. Itās not a good argument at all.
Yes, i point out whackamole in my comment. Itās a completely useless critique of tor/briar because there is no alternative which cannot also be critiqued like this, and there can never be.
you might as well say āwell the problem with keyboards is that someone needs to ship it to you.ā
Bridges are trivial to use tho. And even if they get blocked too actively, a lot of people in such censored regions have a VPN anyway (although I still donāt have an understanding whether a VPN decreases Torās security if used like this.
TOR isnāt a centralized service, itās a distributed network.
Itās also a specific procol, which can absolutely be blocked. I donāt know where this notion that itās impossible to block tor because it was designed to be censorship resistant came from, but you can absolutely stop people from using it.
Itās not even that hard and thereās nothing end users can do about it if they donāt know how to circumvent itā¦
Being able to be blocked is a completely different thing than being centralized service.
I mean, if users donāt know how to circumvent something, by definition there is nothing that they can do about it.
However, unless this hypothetical censoring country is blocking all encrypted network traffic it is trivial to access TOR via a VPN or an SSH tunnel
It can be blocked, but blocking bridges is a constant whack-a-mole (especially now that they have Webtunnel which, while apparently not as robust as some dedicated obfuscation solutions, is still a noticeable improvement). My bigger problem with Briar is that both recipients have to be online to message, or you have to set up a āmailboxā.
What do you think about OLVID?
Donāt use Session! Itās not secure with the recent changes!
I used to think session is a way to go, but nowā¦well simplex is literally all you need for communication with anyone
First impression: why another messaging system?
It may be fine, but what does it bring that Signal/Briar/Matrix/XMPP+Omemo doesnāt have? Does it use existing standard protocol or encryption thatās compatible with other messengers, to avoid fragmentation?
I think it has tor routing by default, so different in that way?
Briar use Tor by default as well for Internet connections, so I donāt think Session is unique in that way. And both appear decentralized.
A difference is that Briar is Android-only, whereas session is available on more platforms sourceforge.net/ā¦/Briar-vs-Session-vs-Signal/
Itās good that people are working on privacy-preserving tools. But I wish theyād coordinate to avoid fragmentation. Work on common/standard messenging protocols, so that people can talk to each other even using different software.
Currently it feels like going back to the 1990s-2000s, with ICQ/AIM/MSNM being all incompatible, and every single one being unable to communicate with a large fraction of your contacts.
Fair, Iāve never used Briar, so I was mostly responding to the others. I complete agree though, the fact that there are so many is super frustrating.
Session is an Australian conpany afaik. The entire app reeks of entrapment. Australian laws are all about no privacy for you.
They recently relocated to Switzerland, after the AFP visited an employee, unannounced, at their home.
what in the fucking dystopia are they doing.
You can easily re-roll usernames in Signal, and profiles in SimpleX. I couldnāt find an equivalent feature in Session.
Not sure, Iāve never used session but I think less tech savvy people would want to use signal because it is similar to Whatsapp, which they are used to.