Many people who focus on information security, including myself, have long considered Telegram suspicious and untrustworthy. Now, based on findings published by the investigative journalism outlet ISt

Investigation by investigative journalism outlet IStories (EN version by OCCRP) shows that Telegram uses a single, FSB-linked company as their infrastructure provider globally.

Telegram’s MTProto protocol also requires a cleartext identifier to be prepended to all client-server messages.

Combined, these two choices by Telegram make it into a surveillance tool.

I am quoted in the IStories story. I also did packet captures, and I dive into the nitty-gritty technical details on my blog.

Packet captures and MTProto deobfuscation library I wrote linked therein so that others can retrace my steps and check my work.

  • altkey@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    So, basically, this cool guy Durov sold an idea of a confidential messenger hosted by a russian FBI. Add there that you can’t lawfully buy a SIM wihtout a local passport, so everyone using it as a lawful citizens have everything they’ve posted right to their registered entity. And that you can link persons even without obvious address book sniffing.