[milderworkacc]

I'm not sure if this meets the bar for substantive and thoughtful discussion, but this kind of corporate cowardice, enforced by unelected bureaucrats standing at the bully pulpit is only going to get worse as the noose tightens on the open web.

The combination of hardware attestation and walled garden "app stores" is the end goal of most policymakers in this area, and it happens to suit the monopolists in Google and Apple and Facebook down to the ground.

Perhaps a timely reminder that things do not always get better over time, and that we may have lived past the high point of secure communications in our lifetime.

[Aerroon]

Hardware attestation really sounds like one of the worst things that could've happened to computers.

[SlinkyOnStairs]

It's not just "the death of the open web".

These decisions are made whilst America is falling to fascism. Meta may not intend for the abolition of E2E encryption to make fascist crackdown on free speech easier, but that is the reality of what abolishing E2E encryption does.

DHS is already subpoenaing tech companies for the information about users who criticize ICE. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/technology/dhs-anti-ice-s...

The "walled garden" isn't even that big a concern anymore. The gestapo reading every single digital communication you have and showing up to harass, threaten, or simply disappear you into a camp if the infraction is severe enough. That is what's at stake here.

[lyu07282]

This is getting pushed in the EU too, the crucial thing to understand about where the road is headed: the goal is the inverse of who does the illicit content scanning. The idea is the government gives a list of illegal activity/speech to the platforms (such as anti-ICE activism or speaking in support of Palestinians) and then the platforms scan (presumably with LLMs) all public and private messages, deletes them and forwards them to federal and local law enforcement of the user. This is why E2E is under attack everywhere, because it makes that impossible.

[chadgpt2]

Do people expect that Instagram can't read their Instagram private messages? I don't think people expect that. And E2EE is not nearly as cheap as the HN crowd likes to pretend—how do those devices get those keys if not through a central service? Especially if one of them is a web browser?

[torben-friis]

>Do people expect that Instagram can't read their Instagram private messages? I don't think people expect that.

A deeper question is why we reached a point where people can't reasonably expect their communication to not be spied on.

[Slash65]

People, or at least Americans, didn’t care in 2012 when the Snowden reveal happened. We’ve been at that point for over a decade now.

[2ndorderthought]

Considering the average person thinks that opening websites in incognito means no one knows they visited them, I would agree.

[sharyphil]

"Be wary of malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys"

[lovich]

were like 20 years past that, at the very least 10 years with Snowden.

The people have spoken, caring about your communications not being spied on puts you in the minority. I mean like, just look at social media. You have tons of people who not only don't care about being spied on, they actively document everything for more views.

[dmbche]

PRISM?

[mrexcess]

The answer to most everyone question you’re asking is just, “public key cryptography”. It’s kind of disheartening to me that such basic 1990s tech as implemented by Phil Zimmerman is now obscure enough to merit questions like this.

Both parties exchange public keys through the central service. Only the possessor of the respective (on device, Secure Enclave ideally) private keys can decrypt the messages encrypted to the public key. The process can also work in reverse, encrypting with the private key so only holders of the public key can decrypt: this is called “signing”.

[feurio]

And how does one verify that the public key received belongs to the intended party, rather than a mitm?

If the answer is blind trust in a third party that runs the messaging service then I suspect that you can guess what the people asking those questions are really asking.

[danparsonson]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exc...

If Meta are turning it off then I guess it's reasonable to assume that there is something to turn off.

[LPisGood]

Diffe-Hellman-Merkel key exchange is vulnerable to attacker-in-the-middle attacks.

Eave could just do key negotiation with Alice and separately do key negotiation with Bob. You have to use a slightly more complicated cryptographic protocol to avoid this issue.

[traderj0e]

The only way to avoid this issue is if Alice and Bob can talk out-of-band. There's no protocol that fixes this.

[tardedmeme]

How would the keys get stored in the user's private browsing window? Do they lose all chat history when they log in on a private browsing window and then close it?

[danparsonson]

I don't know the technical details of that for sure, but I think the answer is that keys and chat history are stored on-device only; for example you lose your WhatsApp history if you don't restore a backup when moving to a new phone.

If a messaging app is showing you message history in a private browsing window then perhaps the encryption key for that history is derived from your password or something like that; that can be done locally so that all the server ever sees is encrypted data.

[mrexcess]

> And how does one verify that the public key received belongs to the intended party, rather than a mitm?

Fingerprints. Again, this is like Crypto 101. Not saying that as a personal attack of any kind, I just remain incredulous that what used to be entry level knowledge in “our thing” has evidently become so obscure.

[traderj0e]

You shouldn't be talking down like this, you're wrong about it. Alice and Bob need to exchange keys beforehand in some trusted out-of-band way. There's no protocol that solves this if Eve can be in the middle. I'm not sure what you mean by fingerprints, but if you describe a protocol, I can describe the mitm attack.

[mrexcess]

You’re not sure what key fingerprints are?

Bob and Alice are setting up their e2e channel, and because they have some extra level of concern about snooping, they telephone each other and read off some form of hash of the public key to each other.

A more complex variant would be something like PGP implemented, where Bob and Alice could both sign each others keys after this exchange, ensuring that someone who hadn’t met Bob but did trust Alice could inherit trust in Bob’s Alice-signed key.

You’ve stated unequivocally that I’m wrong, so now, please show your homework.

[traderj0e]

No, it's not at all this simple. This is why so many "e2ee" apps like Telegram are bogus, they ended up prioritizing UX over security because there are many places where you can't pick both.

[mrexcess]

Webs of trust based on OOB key verification and signing, or centralized trust authorities are the two primary models I’m aware of.

I’ve always been enamored of the idea of DNS as a back end protocol to enable the former largely decentralized solution.

Bob looks up Alice and receives her key from Alice’s namespace within the DNS hierarchy, along with her trust claims. David then looks up Alice’s key within her namespace, sees a reference to endorsement by Bob, and can validate this by querying Bob’s namespace. David can also issue non-authoritative queries about Alice’s key to Bob’s DNS servers, ensuring that there is no mismatch between the query response received by Bob and the one received by David.

If Mallory manages to compromise Alice’s DNS, but not Bob’s, the result is a mismatch in query responses that both Bob and David can thus detect.

At scale, a MITM compromising a system like this would be difficult without compromise of a large number of independent namespaces, increasing the likelihood of detection via the non-authoritative queries.

The missing component in this arrangement is cryptographic security of DNS, which I cynically suspect is why the DNSsec working group was comprised of the usual suspects and eventually produced a protocol without query encryption. It could still be layered on by a protocol extension, however.

[traderj0e]

In practice it's possible to make a system that's hard to mitm if users are diligent. WhatsApp publishes a public record of hashes of the keys. If both sides check that record against their local keys, it's hard for WhatsApp to present different versions to each. Though that's a more recent development.

The harder part that Instagram is most likely concerned about is getting low-effort users to keep their private keys safe without losing them.

[rileymat2]

The fly in the ointment is that they control the software and updates to that closed software so can short circuit that with appropriate pressure.

[Terr_]

Throwing this on the "brainstorm if we had an ideal legislative world" pile: Stealing a user's private key should be a felony, even if it hasn't (yet) been abused for anything.

The tricky part is keeping it from being "permitted" by a crappy contract of adhesion. Banning it entirely would make it very difficult to buy/sell backup services...

[mrexcess]

Legal solutions to technical problems are always dubious, especially when privacy against government surveillance is the problem.

[Terr_]

Ah, but not nearly as dubious as technical solutions to legal problems...

[mrexcess]

That would seem to constitute Honest Services Fraud under federal law, if they promised E2E then sabotaged it intentionally…

[rileymat2]

Not in the case of mandated back doors and warrants.

[mrexcess]

I’m not sure why you think so? If the service provider claims E2E but intentionally provides a defective version of this, it’s a pretty clear cut violation of the federal statute, which afaik based on the statute’s language contains no exceptions for defects cajoled into being inserted by government pressure short of a clear statute mandating it, which does not exist afaik.

[ryandrake]

I would expect any message facilitated by a company's software, and going through that same company's servers to be compromised.

[traderj0e]

Exactly. E2EE comes with UX consequences that you can't just bolt on later. There might be something to be outraged about, but this alone isn't it.

[onemoresoop]

Ok, so drop all pretense then and blatantly scavenge through private conversations? Then take whatever from there and maybe sell it to highest bidder?