I guess the xAI thing might just be a money grab for Telegram and Durov.
The Russian MPs thing might be a red herring, there's been plenty of stuff recently aimed at distracting from this Telegram story – including a brand new interview by Tucker Carlson with Durov.
Telegram and Durov knew for weeks this is coming, as the investigative journalists had tor each out for comment. So they had time to prepare their little games.
Thank you, it is refreshing to see someone honestly and earnestly engaging in a conversation about this. The "Tor is a honeypot" thing is very often an all but religiously held belief.
It would be great to have real analysis knowing which data centers or actors have the biggest control of exit nodes. If there’s really a way to de-anonimyze any traffic from there.
To truly and reliably de-anonymize Tor traffic, one would need to run over 51% of all Tor nodes. Since the US is not the only entity potentially interested in that (Russia and China might be as well), unless these entities coordinate and share data, they will thwart one another from reaching that kind of saturation.
Since we are on the topic, another concern regarding Tor network is the possibility of correlation attacks.
It might be possible to somewhat fuzzily reason about Tor users by observing traffic on both sides of the tunnel, using timing and packet sizes for analysis. But a). it is going to be very fuzzy; b). it requires global network observation capability. NSA might or might not have that to some extent, but they would not risk exposing that for anything but the most valuable targets.
I'd rather just stay away from it entirely and use a VPN for my privacy when searching media and stuff.
VPNs are a specific tool for a specific thing, they don't "preserve privacy" in the general sense. You are basically trading ISP's or local spooks' ability to observe your traffic for VPN's operator's and the local spooks' there ability to do so. In some cases it makes sense, in some – not so much.
Depends on your threat model.™
It's trivial for a nation state, they have lists of these groups. These groups are promoted in other groups and other channels and other forums and eventually reach somebody who will make a note of them.
Soatak
Soatok. At least get the name right.
The simplest thing for [Soatok] to have done would be to ignore the message
Which also happens to be the simplest thing you could have done, even simpler as none of the toots you quote were addressed to you. Instead, you are dragging this one random exchange into this thread about something else entirely.
There were reports (claims I suppose) that the fsb were using telegram to organise the stochastic gig job sabotage across Europe
No no, reports: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/russia-uses-telegram-to-recruit-spies-and-saboteurs-in-europe/ar-AA1xshqO
Does what has been found here shed any more light on that?
Not really/not directly, I would say. What you are describing is FSB using Telegram for recruitment. That does not require network-level observability and surveillance. That's a different "feature", so to speak.
I hate it when I don’t know an acronym, but this one is particularly hurtful to my brain since everyone is saying “yeah, that link to the FSB was obvious glad someone demonstrated it.” So… I will just assume FSB=KGB and be done.
Russian FSB is the successor of the Soviet KGB, so yeah, that works.
Take for example Tor network (high number of exit nodes are controlled)
I substantiated my claims about Telegram by a pretty deep technical analysis. Mind at least providing a link for your pretty strong claim about Tor?
Except those apps or protocols that are truly decentralized (e.g. OMEMO in XMPP), these are good.
Nope. Decentralization is important from power dynamics standpoint, but can actually be detrimental to information security due to (among others) metadata and complexity.
(I defend infrastructure and perform hacks against cryptograph & protocols for a living)
If you need to say it…
Regarding Soatok, I am prone to completely ignore impolite individuals.
Please feel free to ignore me as well then, because saying that technical analysis by an expert can be outright ignored just because the expert happened to be impolite that one time might make me become somewhat impolite.
Imagine getting dozens of randos in your replies asking about dozens of random chat apps. At some point I am pretty sure you'd also reach a breaking point. Some would call that kind of behaviour a bit impolite, I'd wager.
After reading the article, my understanding is that what was sent in “private chat” was in fact encrypted (for the most part) and can be considered secured (to the degree - something is off and, maybe we didn’t find out yet, how the encryption is compromised).
"Secret Chats", but otherwise spot-on, yes.
I am making a point of clarifying here because Telegram thrives on ambiguity. "Private chat" might mean anything in that system. "Secret Chat" is a specific feature that almost nobody uses but gives Telegram cover to claim they do end-to-end encryption.
But it would wise to treat all other conversations as something that is compromised. Is this a fair summary?
Yes, that's what I would say.
Telegram has access to everything that is not a "Secret Chat". They are responding to data requests. It's unclear what they include in these responses. They are also linked to FSB, through the same Vedeneev guy that owned GNM (the infrastructure provider).
Thank you, that means a lot. For people working in information security it really feels sometimes that a). a lot of stuff is obvious, b). people just don't listen and don't care.
Your comment shows how incorrect this is. That really helps keep motivated.
I would most definitely not recommend Matrix for private or sensitive communication, no.
https://soatok.blog/2024/07/31/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-signal-competitor/
https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-olm-library/
Matrix is fine as IRC replacement, it might also be a decent replacement for Telegram's channels thingy, sure. But I would not trust my family photos to it. Much less anything actually important.
If IStories' reporting on GNM's connection to FSB and GNM's access to Telegram's traffic is correct – and I have no reason to believe otherwise, this has gone through two rounds of fact-checking and these are people who had been sued for "defamation" in the most journalist-hostile, oligarch-friendly jurisdiction in the world (UK) and have repeatedly won – then this means the threat model now includes the FSB potentially being able to:
Both of these globally, regardless of what SIM card was used to register any of accounts involved, and without having to ask Telegram for any data.
I don't know if FSB is actually using this capability, and to what extent, and against whom. But based on IStories' reporting and on my own packet captures analysis it is entirely possible for them to do so if they choose to.