This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, som…

Blog post by crypto professor Matthew Green, discussing what Telegram does (I wasn’t familiar with it) and criticizing its cryptography. He says Telegram by default is not end-to-end encrypted. It does have an end-to-end “secret chat” feature, but it’s a nuisance to activate and only works for two-person chats (not groups) where both people are online when the chat starts.

It still isn’t clear to me why Telegram’s founder was arrested. Green expresses some concern over that but doesn’t give any details that weren’t in the headlines.

  • pivot_root@lemmy.world
    152·
    2 months ago

    We really don’t need more than #3 for a reason to stay far away from Telegram. Security through obscurity is not security, and neither is rolling your own crypto.

    • Andy@programming.dev
      3·
      2 months ago

      Just note that the comment was inaccurate, in that their weird encryption is indeed open source at least.