Matthew Green on Telegram’s Encryption

numberri • August 28, 2024 10:14 AM

A lot of me would like to give the news articles the benefit of the doubt, but I’ve seen a lot of governments go after E2EE, regardless of how trustworthy that encryption is. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a purposeful oversight by the news sites that you can use E2EE, therefore it is mentioned as an encrypted message app, and also it has a problem with [Russian hackers, child abusers, and anything else the general public would be outraged about].

If the news keeps on pushing how E2EE enables these things, the average, non-tech-informed person would probably be inclined to agree that E2EE is bad, even if it is protecting them and their privacy.

Clive Robinson • August 28, 2024 11:48 AM

As Matthew Green notes,

“This post is inspired by the recent and concerning news that Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov has been arrested by French authorities”

What many do not know is that the Encryption it sometimes uses was a “roll your own” by Durov’s younger brother.

And as I’ve previously mentioned with the likes of Zoom and other conferencing systems widely deployed during “lockdown” E2EE is very rarely if ever used in conferencing systems, and even when it is, the system is extraordinarily vulnerable around the “summing” or “mixing” node, that is used to keep “bandwidth down” thus reduce latency etc.

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