Technology

What would you recommend as an alternative for the general non-technical population?

No questions from me, just wanna say:

Excellent goddamned work.

Favorited this whole post for future reference.

No questions. Hats off. Thank you for your service, it always seemed like a honeypot to me. Nice to see some evidence other than my gut feeling.

There were reports (claims I suppose) that the fsb were using telegram to organise the stochastic gig job sabotage across Europe.

Joining a neo fash telegram group, pretending to be a rich neo fash who wants to help the cause but not risk themselves and paying people for putting up posters, damaging equipment etc.

Does what has been found here shed any more light on that? I'd guess it would allow them to find these groups to target them very easily? That was the bit I couldn't quite understand from the original report, if so this all makes more sense.

Any advice for people that used it in the past? After reading the article, my understanding is that what was sent in "private chat" was in fact encrypted (for the most part) and can be considered secured (to the degree - something is off and, maybe we didn't find out yet, how the encryption is compromised). But it would wise to treat all other conversations as something that is compromised. Is this a fair summary?

Well, it was obvious to you. I'm a casual user, who tries to "do his best" and consider himself "somewhat informed" - obviously not by your standard. It was all news to me, and I find tremendous value in this article.

I know, right? That's why investigative journalism is such a thankless, frustrating job. You need to prove beyond any doubt things that are often pretty obviously true.

Roman Anin and the rest of the IStories team did an absolutely amazing job. Found court documents going years back. Dug up signed statements and contracts. They did something nobody in the infosec community seemed to have done: actually looked at the IP addresses used by Telegram and followed that lead to its logical conclusion. And then published all of the receipts!

And still people will say this is "unsubstantiated" or find other ways to wave this off.

And yet this does move the needle. There is now proof of things we kinda sorta knew was probably true for years. It doesn't sound like much perhaps, but it's really important.

I hate it when I don’t know an acronym, but this one is particularly hurtful to my brain since everyone is saying “yeah, that link to the FSB was obvious glad someone demonstrated it.” So… I will just assume FSB=KGB and be done.

Russian FSB is the successor of the Soviet KGB, so yeah, that works.

Take for example Tor network (high number of exit nodes are controlled)

I substantiated my claims about Telegram by a pretty deep technical analysis. Mind at least providing a link for your pretty strong claim about Tor?

Except those apps or protocols that are truly decentralized (e.g. OMEMO in XMPP), these are good.

Nope. Decentralization is important from power dynamics standpoint, but can actually be detrimental to information security due to (among others) metadata and complexity.

If you were to use their network to take advantage of the features for anything that the “predator” behind doesn’t care, you’re fine.

But what will the predator care about tomorrow? Or next year? And how confident are you that aggregate data is not what they want, for whatever reason?

I guess the xAI thing might just be a money grab for Telegram and Durov.

The Russian MPs thing might be a red herring, there's been plenty of stuff recently aimed at distracting from this Telegram story – including a brand new interview by Tucker Carlson with Durov.

Telegram and Durov knew for weeks this is coming, as the investigative journalists had tor each out for comment. So they had time to prepare their little games.

As long as they’re not using Russian-purchased sims to manage and post to the channels, how does this change their security model going forward?

If IStories' reporting on GNM's connection to FSB and GNM's access to Telegram's traffic is correct – and I have no reason to believe otherwise, this has gone through two rounds of fact-checking and these are people who had been sued for "defamation" in the most journalist-hostile, oligarch-friendly jurisdiction in the world (UK) and have repeatedly won – then this means the threat model now includes the FSB potentially being able to:

• figure out where a user is in the world just by observing their Telegram network traffic, live or close to live;
• with some additional analysis, based on timing and packet sizes correlation, probably figure out who that user is communicating via Telegram.

Both of these globally, regardless of what SIM card was used to register any of accounts involved, and without having to ask Telegram for any data.

I don't know if FSB is actually using this capability, and to what extent, and against whom. But based on IStories' reporting and on my own packet captures analysis it is entirely possible for them to do so if they choose to.

they already who which user is which IP from the servers they control
(...)
when they already control Telegram’s servers

Who is "they" here?

If you meant "the compromised provider" here, then no, we cannot assume they know which IP address is used by which user. Full disk encryption exists, you can rent a (physical, dedicated, as is the case here) server from a provider and set it up in such a way that you can be reasonably sure that the provider does not have access to the data on the server.

So in that case the provider would only see the traffic without the ability to connect easily IP addresses with actual devices or users. That is not enough to reliably track anyone long-term, as IP addresses change in ways that often make it difficult to figure out if some traffic comes from the same user/device or not – especially when you travel. But add an identifier visible directly on the wire, like the auth_key_id, and you can pretty easily say "yes, this new IP address is now used by the same device".

If you mean "Telegram", and assume Telegram cooperates fully with the FSB, to the point of providing unfettered access to data on Telegram's servers, then sure. But I cannot prove that, and neither could the IStories team. Can you? You can of course make any assumption you want to (and I am not saying your assumption here is necessarily wrong – only that I cannot prove it), but when I publish I can only work on things that I or somebody else can prove.

And in this story, I can prove that Telegram's protocol has a very weird, unexpected "feature" that combined with IP address allows anyone with sufficient access to track Telegram users. I can show that this feature is not necessary in such a protocol – other protocols used by other similar tools do not have that issue. And IStories team seem to be able to prove that all Telegram traffic flows through a single infrastructure provider that has ties to the Russian FSB.

That's all we got currently, but that's already plenty. Because both of these are decisions made by Telegram, and they strongly reinforce one another.

It just seems like an incompetent implementation.

If that was the only weird technological decision by Telegram with strong consequences for privacy of its users, I could agree.

But as I discuss at length in that blogpost, Telegram has a long, long history of such "incompetence"; they also tend to react badly to anyone pointing this kind of thing out. The auth_key_id issue has been pointed out years ago and not only is it not fixed, there is no indication that Telegram even considers fixing it.

Can you imagine the veritable shitstorm if Signal pulled something like that?

As I wrote in my blogpost, in the end it does not matter if this is incompetence or malice – the end result is exactly the same.