Tegram stores all the conversation in their servers, since you don’t need to be connected in the phone or have the phone witchednon if you want to chat in the pc, or in another phone. This means that the authority is the server. WhatsApp it’s not like that, if you delete a shared photo after a while it will be cached out and you will lost access to it, meaning that they don’t store that stuff. The same thing happens with WhatsApp desktop or web, they stay in an infinite loading icon until you twitch on the phone or sometimes even unlock it.
This means that whatever telegram develops must not only keep the group chat encrypted in the server, but any valid client of a user must be able to decipher the content, so every client must somehow have the key to unlock the content. One way of doing it would be for every client of a single user to generate keys (which I’m sure they already do) and reform a key exchange between them, to share that way a single shared key, which is what identifies your account. Then toy could use that shared key to decipher the group chat shared key which telegram can store on their server or do whatever is done in those cases, I’m not that well versed.
The problem here lies in what happens when you delete and/or logout of all the accounts, currently you can login into the server again, because telegram has all the info required, but if they store the “shared key” then it’s all moot, I guess they could store a user identifying key pair, with the private key encrypted with a password, so that it can be accessed from wherever. They should as always offer MFA and passkey alternatives to be able to identify as yourself every time you want to log into a new client, without requiring the password and so on.
This is some roughly designed idea I just had that should theoretically work, but I’m sure that there’s more elegant ways to go about this.
It’s work for sure to implement all of this in a secure way, provided that you have to somehow merge everything that already exists into the new encryption model, make everyone create a password and yada yada while making sure that it’s as seamless as possible for users. However, I feel like it’s been quite a while and that if they did not do it already, theybjist won’t, we either trust them with our data or search for an alternative, and sadly there’s no alternative that has all the fuzz right now.
And it infuriates me to no end. It’s one thing to trust them and their servers and it’s another thing altogether to send actual plaintext data around the net, that’s crazy and it’s what people are implying.
For the record, until WhatsApp implemented e2e their messages were indeed fucking plaintext, and it took a while before they were pressured into e2e. It helps for them that their platform is very mobile based vs telegram, where the service is more server based. Telegram did have enough time to implement a server based e2e 0 knowledge encryption protocol though, it’s not really rocket science at this point.
And even then it’s not really a choice, since you can’t really choose to stop having feelings. I guess that for bi people it’s easier to pretend, but where there’s love, there’s love.
It’s like, being a hetero dude and vlbeing forced to go with a girl when there’s another one you love. It’s hard in any case.
Sure but people see that you are on the phone while the IT people don’t really care what you do and by bosses aren’t checking those logs so idc. it’s about being discreet on some layers.
If I were at home I wouldn’t need to do anything to hide it since I would use my pc but since I’m in the office I have to get creative.
Also, 5hisbpost was 7 days old :)
Well, yeah, if I worked at home I would use my personal computer for personal things and the workstation for work, it would be pristine. But alas, in the office there’s so much time I can spend pretending that I’m working because I finished my tasks before I implode.
Some risks are necessary :)
It’s not really about IT not knowing, but about being discreet enough that your boss doesn’t see your personal accounts logged in or even worse, to have two chrome profiles, both with obscure names, press the wrong one and to share the screen of saved tabs with Facebook, Instagram, pornhub… Yeah I’ve seen those bookmarks.
It’s… Wtf… If you’re going to be that deranged, at the very least be discreet… Sigh.
I wasn’t talking about situations with compromised accounts, I was talking about legitimate accounts that were created in a typical way being converted to a zero knowledge encryption method, I was aknowledging that it’s hard doing that conversion when a user might have several clients logged on (2 phones, 6 computers…).
My point was that if they have not put any motivation in the transition, they never will because the bigger the userbase, the harder for them to manage the transition. Also, I find that sad because they should have invested more effort in that instead of all the features we are getting, but whatever.
If you found the technical terms confusing, public/private keys are some sort of asymmetric “passwords” used in cryptography that secure messages, and shared keys would be symmetrical passwords. The theory between key exchanges and all around those protocols are taught in introductory courses to cryptography in bachelors and masters, and I’m sorry to say that I don’t have the energy to explain more but feel free to read about the terms if you feel like it.
If you however found it confusing because I write like crap, I’m sorry for potentially offending you with the above paragraph and I’ll blame my phone keyboard about it :)