Comment on US: Alaska man busted with 10,000+ child sex abuse images despite his many encrypted apps
CrazyLikeGollum@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoHe didn’t use encrypted everything. He had a public telegram group chat in which he stored a lot of his material. Which, as many people in the comments on the article pointed out, is not encrypted, but is presented by telegram as if it is. That’s likely how they caught him.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
To be clear, it’s encrypted*.
Deello@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Recent events have taught me that only individual chats are encrypted*. Group chats don’t have that feature.
Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
In telegram nothing is e2e encrypted unless you specifically ask it to be and when you do, it kills all the functionality that makes it better than others.
Deello@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
That’s what I said. The person I replied to said that all messages are encrypted* with the asterisk being only if you specifically enable it. I clarified that it doesn’t apply to group chats though. I don’t use Telegram so the loss of functionality is actually a bigger deal to me than the argument around E2EE. Can you explain what features are lost when you enable it? It’s a messaging app so I’m curious what you sacrifice for E2EE.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 2 weeks ago
Telegram groups are not E2E.
Chats are encrypted, but the servers hold the encryption keys (I believe).
There are one-to-one chats that are full e2e, but you have to enable it. And it has all sorts of compromises.
Qualifier: this is as dicumented by telegram. Since it’s not open source, we can’t really verify it
uzay@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
There is no point in encrypting a public group chat since anyone can join and decrypt it anyway.
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The secret chats feature isn’t between anyone I believe, it’s between two people. But I don’t actually know for certain because I’ve not looked into it beyond a cursory googling.
That said, you’d be correct in that just like any service out there, the moment you let random people join there’s no level of encryption that can keep your secrets secret.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It works well in Matrix, and you can restrict who joins on that platform.
uzay@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
If you restrict it, then it isn’t public. I’m not saying that encrypted group chats are useless. But if it is public and anyone can join anyway, then encryption adds no secrecy.
datendefekt@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
AFAIK chat contents are stored unencrypted on the server.