Ukraine Bans Telegram Use For State, Military Officials
www.rferl.org
Ukraine's National Coordination Center for Cyber Security on September 20 banned the usage of the Telegram messenger app for state officials, military personnel, and employees of key infrastructure, citing security issues.
  • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1211·
    2 months ago

    Wait, the centralized service that security experts warned for years could be easily compromised because a centralized messaging service is inherently insecure has now been compromised? Surprised Pikachu face

    • MehBlah@lemmy.worldEnglish
      494·
      2 months ago

      Owned by a fake rebel russian who has somehow managed to keep from falling out of a window on a high floor. Cough, cough plant.

    • Star@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      131·
      2 months ago

      Not to discredit your arguement but isn’t Signal also centralised?

      • lemmylommy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        22·
        2 months ago

        It is. But it is open source and the encryption is solid. All communication data is end-to-end encrypted. They have been subpoenaed before and all they could provide was when the account was first registered and when it was last used. The signal protocol is well documented and open source. The foundation and LLC behind it are registered in California and are run by reputable people.

        Telegram is run by shady people, supposedly out of Dubai, while it is registered in the British Virgin Islands. Its clients are also open source, however the encryption, if enabled, is of the home cooked variety, although it was improved over time. Unfortunately it is not enabled by default, you need to enter a „secure chat“ for that, which only works with single contacts, not with groups. Despite having access to everything else, and working like a social media-messenger-hybrid, telegram is very reluctant to get rid of clearly illegal content.

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldEnglish
        9·
        2 months ago

        The data is not centralized in the same way, making it slightly better, but yeah. A lot of the same pitfalls of centralization happen there. The whole system doesn’t operate without the corporate servers in the middle, even though they don’t see or store the data. They have total access to Metadata. The organization could be sold for profit, shut down, change terms, etc.

        If security is important, you’re better off with something decentralized like matrix. I’m not an expert, so hopefully, a lot of people here who are smarter than me will fact check these statements, but at least those are my impressions.

      • MiltownClowns@lemmy.worldEnglish
        61·
        2 months ago

        It is, which is why the comment didn’t advocate for it. Signal has more robust encryption than telegram, but its not zero-trust. They should really be using private hosted services instead of public or pgp, but when battle kicks off you use whatever works and then go back and revise as needed when you’re not dodging bombs.

  • cheese_greater@lemmy.worldEnglish
    401·
    2 months ago

    Was kinda wondering when they were gonna cut the cord, Telegram is likely thoroughly compromised and compromising

  • 0laura@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    161·
    2 months ago

    telegram chats are also not end to end encrypted to my knowledge, only the secret chats which have some limitations afaik. and group chats also aren’t encrypted. unless that changed recently. id even trust Whatsapp more than telegram, at least they say they’re end to end encrypted.

  • triptrapper@lemmy.worldEnglish
    142·
    2 months ago

    I know nothing about cyber security, but it’s funny to me that depending on the time of day these comment sections either mostly criticize Telegram or mostly support it. I have no idea what to believe or whether it’s safe for me to use Telegram.

      • mitram2@lemmy.ptEnglish
        51·
        2 months ago

        Honestly curious, what was missing on Signal and what was complicated? I can’t even remember the sign up process and never felt I was missing out on features, at least not on features available elsewhere

          • mitram2@lemmy.ptEnglish
            3·
            2 months ago

            Oh, I never knew Signal had such humble beginnings. I think you would be very surprised if you ever give it another shot. It’s pretty much “install an app and talk” (with the pretty stuff!]). Never heard of SimpleX, might give it a look someday. Thank you!

  • Wilshire@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    81·
    2 months ago

    I presume this will have zero effect, especially since it includes this huge exemption.

    Those who use Telegram “part of their job duties” will not be affected by the move.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      SMMs for officials, volunteers and military would keep posting, right. It’s inside communications that are a concern. And as some ukrainians wrote, in some places it was an obvious rule from the very start.

    • Alex@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      2 months ago

      I assume that is too cover the intelligence officers monitoring the Russian milbloggers.

      • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
        113·
        2 months ago

        Network effects… Once community picks the app, it ain’t changing.

        It pretty amazing that two years into the war this is still an issue in Ukraine especially at government/military level.

        I get plebs giving fuck all due to poor understanding, the state taking this long doesn’t make sense. These issues were brought from the start of the invasion.

          • sunzu2@thebrainbin.org
            22·
            2 months ago

            Because Russian corpos shoved into their faces and the state was too stupid to see the issue with it despite being at war with Russia since 2014.

            People who criticized this were mercelessly mocked by the normies…

            Aka the same thing happening in the US, at least consequences aint bad here… For now

      • oce 🐆English
        2·
        2 months ago

        Maybe choosing your poison? Viber belongs to the Japanese company Rakuten, so it may be more interesting geopolitically, depending on your country.

  • Korkki@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1317·
    2 months ago

    I would never risk any third party messaging service in military or critical state matters. It’s just common sense, even for a layman. Everything is compromised, Telegram is, Whatsapp is, Signal is, all of them are.

      • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
        192·
        2 months ago

        It’s not, unless they’re some sort of cryptography expert with a peer-reviewed white paper pending publication. The Signal protocol (GPLv3) is extremely robust and has almost no capacity for metadata generation, and both the app and server-side code are under the AGPLv3 (technically if they were compromised they could use different, unaudited server-side code, but refer back to “basically no metadata”). Signal has essentially no capacity to be compromised; they can’t even bait and switch users with a pre-compiled app whose source code isn’t the publicly available one and actually has a backdoor because their builds are reproducible and it would be caught immediately.

        Maybe they take issue with the crypto bullshit, which is valid but doesn’t compromise messaging security. Maybe they don’t like that they took away SMS, which I completely agree with, but also actually makes it marginally more secure. Either way, I seriously doubt if they had any mathematical insight into Signal being “compromised” that they would be here hanging around on Lemmy right now.

        • Kwozyman@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          2 months ago

          Be that as it may, it’s still an incredibly short sighted decision to use a centralized service that is under 3rd party control for real security sensitive applications.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            82·
            2 months ago

            Yeah, that does bother me. But it’s also a lot easier to build a centralized service like that than to get people on a decentralized one.

            If you really want something private and are willing to jump through a few hoops, Simplex exists. But most people aren’t willing to jump through a few hoops, and even Signal (a pretty low bar) is a hard enough sell as it is. And that’s why I use Signal, because it’s my best chance to get people onto something better. In other words, don’t let perfect be the enemy of better.

    • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      I would never risk any third party messaging service in military or critical state matters.

      Ah, so mister genius would write his own, have I heard that right? Would he use XOR twice when encrypting a message, just to be double safe?

      • Korkki@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        2 months ago

        How secure something is an spectrum. Sure self hosted matrix is a lot safer than sending your messages through meta servers for example. It’s about what is the threat levels of what one is doing. Total tinfoiling like writing your own quantum proof multi encryption ciphers and sending that over an tamper proof usb stick with self destruct mechanism by a carrier pridgeon is not necessary or practical for average people who just want privacy, but for critical government applications and especially the military it might be. That is what we are talking about here.

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Sure self hosted matrix is a lot safer than sending your messages through meta servers for example.

          A lot safer in which case? I can imagine a few very real ones where it’s not.

          Self-hosted Signal (requires patching the client, but it’s straightforward) server I would understand.

          but for critical government applications and especially the military it might be. That is what we are talking about here.

          Signal devs have a few papers describing how and by what logic they are addressing these problems.

          Again, self-hosting (because accounts can be blocked by Signal) their solution is a better idea.