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by zedred 3485 days ago
> GIF searches are obviously going to use a 3rd party service, and nobody should expect some kind of anonymous encrypted channel for GIF searches. That's ridiculous.

GIF searches aren't being transmitted to a third party service, they're being transmitted directly to Wire in plaintext: https://github.com/wireapp/wire-android-sync-engine/blob/4d5...

There's tons of stuff like that which leaks in the app. They store your entire contact list server-side, your plaintext group membership, group info like plaintext group name and plaintext group avatar, etc etc.

> I've not seen any lying about being open source. They haven't released every piece of code, but I don't recall them ever claiming they did.

Since their launch several years ago, they've had a "feature" matrix on their website that lists Wire as being open source (and their competitors as not being open source). That was long before their recent "open source" announcement (which still isn't even fully open source). When pressed, they said it was because they used some open source libraries. That's really shady.

> I've never seen any crypto experts who have audited Wire and said there's anything wrong with their choices, and you supplied no links.

Here's one example I saw recently:

https://www.cs.jhu.edu/~cwright/oakland08.pdf

They're vulnerable:

https://github.com/wireapp/wire-audio-video-signaling/blob/c...

Even worse, they also apparently include plaintext RTP headers with audio level information in them.

2 comments

Thanks for trying, but it appears to me you're paranoid. The user directory in Wire is public. It is no secret that you're on there. They need information about whom you're connected to for the service to work. I'm not worried about GIF searches, or contact list. I'd prefer the contents of my conversations with family weren't archived on remote servers. Wire accomplishes that in the best way. It's a useless academic concern that audio level information would be in headers, and the paper you linked is of no relevance. I still see no reason why I'd not want to use Wire. For talking to family and friends in a reasonably private way we cannot get from using services from Facebook and Google, I think Wire is an excellent application.
> They store your entire contact list server-side, your plaintext group membership, group info like plaintext group name and plaintext group avatar, etc etc.

One has to remember that Signal also stores some social graph data, which is equally problematic.

I can’t reocmmend either.