[tapoxi]

I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia. People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats. They have money when Telegram is expensive to run, not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life.

The Russian network block and letting people use Telegram again was the government squeezing their biggest source of users and income until they acquiesced.

[NayamAmarshe]

> I'm fairly certain it is deeply connected to Russia.

Just as Signal, Facebook, Google, WhatsApp are deeply connected to the USA?

> People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats.

The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers.

> They have money when Telegram is expensive to run

They literally raised money (a billion dollars) by selling bonds last year and to make Telegram self-sustainable, introduced Telegram Premium.

> not to mention they can easily threaten Durov's life

Which is why Durov (and his whole dev team) moved to the UAE in the first place!

I'm all for healthy skepticism, but there must be a limit. Unproven conspiracies aren't helping anyone, especially from people who have no issues with apps like WhatsApp. Telegram has time and again tried to fight government intervention, and yet that's not enough. The clients are open-source, everything audited by independent researchers and yet, people aren't afraid to make claims that they can't prove.

[bmarquez]

Yeah people keep trying to push the "Russian connection" when it isn't being supported by Durov's actions. It almost feels like a conspiracy theory encouraged by users of competing apps.

There are legitimate reasons to doubt Telegram like the lack of default end-to-end encryption but the Russian thing as a criticism of the app itself is overblown.

[xinayder]

There's reason to believe that specially when you realize VK is actively monitored by Russia and Pavel doesn't care about it at all.

[NayamAmarshe]

Pavel has no control over VK. He sold all his stake when he left Russia.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/1/31/5363990/how-putins-cronie...

[hiimkeks]

> The cloud and E2EE encryption of Telegram have already been audited by independent researchers.

Yes, and they all agree it's crap. Just look at this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6915741 (Feel free to ignore Moxie, but listen to tptacek). In addition, it doesn't even matter since (a) it's not turned on by default and (b) it can't be turned on for group chats.

That said, I agree that Durov probably is not closely collaborating with the Russian state.

[NayamAmarshe]

The thread you linked is talking about a totally different algorithm, not relevant to our discussion.

MTProto 1.0 had flaws and proven vulnerabilities. Telegram ditched the algorithm after 2013.

MTProto 2.0 is much secure and has been audited multiple times already without fail. The security is solid, that's the consensus.

Also, there are 2 types of MTProto 2.0 algorithms. One is cloud encryption and the other is end to end encryption.

Cloud encryption is enabled by default on all chats but for those who need end to end encryption, they can use secret chats.

You can read more about it here: https://core.telegram.org/techfaq#q-how-does-server-client-e...

[hiimkeks]

Apparently they didn't learn much, given that MTProto 2.0 still uses IGE. Or still derives the IV from a hash of the message.

The article you link does not mention "cloud encryption". What is that? TLS?

[NayamAmarshe]

The cloud encryption is what I linked, the Server-Client encryption. Just below it, you can see E2E.

[IYasha]

E2E is not available on all platforms, is hidden in obscure menus and the whole UI discourages users from using it. Telegram is a data-harvesting social goolag-oriented network after all. :-/

[dancemethis]

The server side is still proprietary. They could have just given "dummied" source code to "independent researchers".

Chances are ALWAYS against regular people.

[NayamAmarshe]

> The server side is still proprietary

Open sourcing it would make no difference. Signal's server is open source, yet the sources are always released late. For a whole year, Signal was running a totally different server code than the one they had made public, they even injected some crypto stuff and not a single person knew what the server was running.

This is the nature of servers. Backend is always unverifiable, even if it's got the latest code available to the public. The only thing open source backend is useful for is self-hosting, not verification.

[LukeShu]

If it's encryoted E2E, then you don't need to inspect the server side to verify that. And the client is FOSS, anyone can inspect it. (It is my understanding that group chats are not encrypted; I have not cared to verify that one way or the other, but I could.)

[_trackno5]

How would that make any difference if the traffic is end to end encrypted, though?

Maybe they do something with the metadata, but so can every other messaging service.

This paranoia that everything is linked to Russia is just nuts.

[jruohonen]

Right. If you speak Russian and actually look at what is happening in Telegram, you'd know better. If I was a dissident there and my adversary would be SVR/GRU, I surely wouldn't call it paranoia.

[Aerbil313]

Literally everything can be faked. Independent researchers, etc. Especially by the government. I don’t have an iota of trust in govts.

[tapoxi]

Most Telegram messages are group chats, they are not E2EE at all since Telegram doesn't support them.

[wheresmyshadow]

Sorry but this sounds like conspiracy theory stuff. It is encrypted client-server so your message is misleading. And Durov as far as I'm aware is in Dubai. Russia blocked Telegram in the past and because they actually failed (it was still most popular messenger in there despite the block), so they decided to give up the block and started pumping their own propaganda on their own channels.

[IYasha]

Maaan, don't you see? This was a controlled move: hook up people to a social network, pretend to clumsily ban it (while also testing and upgrading ISP abilities to do it), control reaction, pretend to unban it (oh, we do what peoples asked! we care! we not baddies! we cool!)

While in the same reality aggressively fight TOR, block VPNs, enforce passport registration, etc. etc. There's even a man jailed for running a tor node!

[jojobas]

They just couldn't win and gave up. They accidentally crippled Github, large portions of google cloud and even their own government services while trying to blacklist Telegram and figured it was not worth the risk and getting laughed at.

The Skripal affair and other fuckups highlighted that Russia can't get away with threatening even a retiree's life, let alone millionaire's with some security.

[tapoxi]

Why couldn't they do DPI and block the protocol?

[jojobas]

Because SSL is SSL. They sure tried to block a lot of it. I guess they could collect public keys and block them, but blocking itself is still done by ISP on Roskomnadzor's orders, and they didn't include this capability. That would be another cat and mouse game anyway, you can cut new keypairs faster than you can block them.

[supriyo-biswas]

India does DNS and SNI (which exposes the hostname) based TLS blocking, I wonder why Russia couldn’t do the same.

[jeroenhd]

Domain fronting used to be quite effective at getting past SNI blocking. Extracting github.com out of a TLS packet is trivial but actually verifying the certificate requires compute power.

Major cloud providers have stopped making domain fronting an option (mostly because it was never supposed to happen anyway) but ISPs are never going to try to validate every single TLS certificate to see what traffic to block and what traffic to let through. The overhead would be enormous and people using custom certificate authorities (businesses and private persons) would get their communication blocked for no good reason.

It's also possible to get around SNI by using session resumption instead of doing a full handshake. 0-RTT TLS needs special attention because of replay attack risks, but it can speed up the network while at the same time avoiding SNI blocking once a session has been set up. QUIC offers a similar solution.

As far as I can tell, the tools normally used for traffic interception don't grow as fast as the tools for new communication. Support for certain protocols can take days to implement on the client side but weeks on the middlebox side, and that assumes your middleboxes get regular updates.

Worst case scenario, people just turn on a VPN to a place that doesn't block their apps and you lose all visibility of their network traffic. Implementing this stuff at scale isn't easy.

[jojobas]

I'm pretty sure Telegram runs their own dns with dynamic addresses and you can create a bunch of certificates for weird host names to dupe SNI. Russia dedicated quite some resources to it and couldn't win. I don't think it had any chance unless they're willing to DPI 100% of traffic China style, but even then it's fundamentally impossible to tell random google cloud/aws website api traffic from telegram.

[chupasaurus]

State-controlled DPI couldn't process 0.1% of traffic at the time.

[karp773]

> People believe it's encrypted but it's not for group chats or default for direct chats.

Did they already adopt a proven published alogithm for encryption, or still using a homegrown KGB-Krypt algorithm? Sorry for a trivial question, I am not a user.

[NayamAmarshe]

> Did they already adopt a proven published alogithm for encryption, or still using a homegrown KGB-Krypt algorithm?

Their algorithm itself is proven and published, has been audited multiple times already.

It is not as good Double Ratchet in terms of features but security wise, it's solid.

[tapoxi]

It's still homegrown.

[karp773]

Q.E.D. Thank you!

[matheusmoreira]

This has nothing to do with Russia.