And that's great. But Telegram promotes itself as a secure messenger. And that's a big lie.
If they would advertise themselves as a WeChat / Line for the West, nobody would question it.
How is that a lie? It's not possible to make group chats with cross-device history end-to-end encrypted. If you don't like that feature, don't use it, stick to e2e encrypted DM's. You're saying they are lying because they offer more than just e2e encrypted DM's?
I say they lie about being secure because they're not secure by default. It's an option, and a very inconvenient one. Plenty of other messengers have made e2e encryption easy to use. Telegram has done the opposite, which makes me think that they don't want their users to use truly private messages.
How hard is it to tap on "New secret chat"? In my Android client all I need to do is to tap on the large blue icon in the bottom right corner, choose "New secret chat" (other options: "New group" and "New channel", basically your go-to button for creating new groups/channels), then choose the person. Isn't it basically how you usually create chats in every other messenger? In WhatsApp, you also click on a large green icon in the bottom right corner, with the options being "New group", "New contact" and "New community". In Viber, you click on a large purple icon in the bottom right corner, with the options being "New Group", "New Community", "New Channel".
The security researcher cited in the article used a different flow by going to an existing contact's profile first and opening the hamburger menu there, and claimed the feature is "hidden" because of that (the hamburger menu), when in fact it isn't.
Maybe it's different on iOS though, I don't know.
AFAIK, the main reason why people don't use these "secret chats" in Telegram is that the history stays on one device. It doesn't have to go to the cloud, but you can synchronise it with already linked devices by sharing your keys. As if it was deliberately made inconvenient to use, "encryption brings limitations, it's easier to upload everything to our cloud, trust us".
Well, the FAQ on their site clearly says that only "secret chats" are end-to-end encrypted.
Not sure where the lie is. Although, it indeed may mislead the average user who knows nothing about E2E.
WhatsApp made E2E the default only in 2016, i.e. 7 years after it was founded. Telegram is 11. The whole thing reminds me of http vs. https. Chrome started marking http as "Not Secure" only in 2018. I remember at some point the wisdom was that using http is OK as long as you don't use it to access your bank account etc. So https was like an opt-in ("if you want additional security"). But now it's the default. Telegram resists making E2E the default reportedly for UX reasons (easier data sync on multiple devices).
The lie is that it's not secure by default. Their FAQ clearly says that they have the technical ability to read private messages outside of "secret chats", which is the default option and the majority of messages on the platform.
So all the FAQs on their official site are open about technically being able to read private messages if you don't enable secret chats, and it's somehow lying?
The main page says Telegram is "secure" without elaborating, though. I can see people can be misled, but they're not lied to.
> And that's great. But Telegram promotes itself as a secure messenger. And that's a big lie.
But until someone actually published any hard evidence demonstrating weaknesses (ideally with a PoC), do we have anything else to go by?
I wouldn't say I know for sure Telegram is 100% secure against government interception, but I also wouldn't claim the opposite, because neither ends/claims have been demonstrated and proven in a verifiably way.
> I wouldn't say I know for sure Telegram is 100% secure against government interception, but I also wouldn't claim the opposite, because neither ends/claims have been demonstrated and proven in a verifiably way.
Telegram doesn't even claim to have end-to-end encryption by default (you have to enable it explicitly on a per-chat basis), and doesn't have it at all for group chats. Like, unless they are lying and secretly _do_ have e2e by default, it is clearly worse than many alternatives from this pov.
It's kind of weird that it has come to be known as a secure messenger, but it certainly isn't.
>Starting a Secret Chat takes one more tap than starting a normal chat.
Hmm, the article says this:
>As John Hopkins security researcher Matthew Green pointed out in his blog on the subject, it’s also a pain in the ass to activate. “The button that activates Telegram’s encryption feature is not visible from the main conversation pane, or from the home screen. To find it in the iOS app, I had to click at least four times—once to access the user’s profile, once to make a hidden menu pop up showing me the options, and a final time to ‘confirm’ that I wanted to use encryption. And even after this, I was not able to actually have an encrypted conversation, since Secret Chats only works if your conversation partner happens to be online when you do this,” Green said.
How does that prove that Telegram as a whole is not secure? The only thing that would demonstrate is that your normal, not-E2E encrypted, messages aren't E2E encrypted, which yeah, of course they aren't.
I think you might confuse what the mud puddle test aims to demonstrate. It's to be able to confirm E2E encryption, which if you do that test with Telegram + Secret Chats (which is the E2E encryption feature in Telegram), you'll see you cannot recover those messages.
> How does that prove that Telegram as a whole is not secure?
It depends on what you mean by "as a whole". I mean that Telegram by default can read all your private chats, unless you manually enabled e2ee and suffer from related bad UX. On Linux desktop (and phones) it doesn't even allow to enable e2ee at all.
> It depends on what you mean by "as a whole". I mean that Telegram by default can read all your private chats
Yes, this is the expectation. You use someone else's platform that doesn't have E2E, you assume they can read your messages and will help law enforcement to do the same. No surprise there.
Doesn't mean their E2E feature isn't secure, or that the platform as a whole isn't secure. Facebook surely shares their Facebook + Whatsapp data with US law enforcement, we wouldn't call Facebook/Whatsapp insecure just because of that.
Whatsapp does, as far as anyone can tell, have e2e encryption. Now in principle it may be vulnerable to a government forcing Facebook to compromise it, but it's there.
> The only thing that would demonstrate is that your normal, not-E2E encrypted, messages aren't E2E encrypted, which yeah, of course they aren't.
I mean, if nothing else, that's a bad default. This makes it worse than, say, WhatsApp or the apple messaging thing, nevermind the likes of Matrix or Signal.
They're describing their app in a way that will make regular users think it's actually secure. Call it what you will, false advertising, deliberately misleading - a lie is a lie.
Their website also used to say that they are forever free, no ads, and that they were going to open source all their code, including the server code. Now they have a free tier, but even they couldn't call it "forever free" anymore. I wouldn't trust anything they write there =)
It's about as secure as any other non-E2EE chat or other kind of service, except it also has E2EE mode, which is limited to 1:1 chats for fair reasons. Plenty of other services advertise themselves as "secure," which doesn't mean a lot. So I don't see anything misleading there.
Aside from that, I don't trust Telegram or its CEO at all, partially because of what you said about open-sourcing (or not) and partially because of his ties to Russia and Azerbaijan.
