[saalweachter]

I would phrase it more as "there is no margin of error in cryptography".

In machine learning, a model that works 90%, 95% of the time is pretty good.

A glitchy video game can still be fun as long as the glitches don't happen too often or cause a loss of too much progress.

Even a filesystem that doesn't lose most people's data, most of the time, will have a lot of adherents.

But if your cryptography implementation isn't completely perfect, it's frequently just 100% useless for its intended purpose.

[necubi]

What really sets cryptography apart is that for a non-expert, there is no way to tell whether it's correct or not. Most bad software has bugs that can be found by users. A bad ML model will do poorly in validation.

But a bad crypto implementation will work. For all intents and purposes, it will appear completely fine. Users will get their messages. The bitstream will appear completely random. At least, until somebody with expertise in breaking crypto systems digs into it.

[maqp]

>But a bad crypto implementation will work. For all intents and purposes, it will appear completely fine. Users will get their messages. The bitstream will appear completely random. At least, until somebody with expertise in breaking crypto systems digs into it.

And that applies even if they're using AES but wrong mode of operation. That applies even if they're using best practices like AES-GCM but the CPU doesn't support AES-NI and a cache timing attack allows key exfiltration.

Like Swiftonsecurity wrote:

"Cryptography is nightmare magic math that cares what kind of pen you use. Should math care what kind of pen you use to implement it? No, but Fuck You, this is Cryptography."

The attacks are incredibly subtle for even the best systems, and Telegram is so far away from even adaquate it's difficult to emphasize it so I'll try with my best restraint:

TELEGRAM FUCKING LEAKS EVERY GROUP MESSAGE TO THE SERVER WHICH IS THE EXACT EQUIVALENT OF A FUCKING BACK DOOR.

I hope that didn't leave anything unambiguous.

[sudosysgen]

Group messages on Telegram and normal messages are explicitly not encrypted in order to allow multi-device operation. That is explicit. I don't see how that has anything to do with the security of MTProto.

[setr]

Also notable is that it can't be fixed or patched in the way you'd expect for any other software -- once it's found broken, everything that ever used it is now broken unless they're re-encrypted. There's no migration path to the fixed version