Molly: An Improved Signal App

Wire was able to implement a fully E2E-encrypted messenger with proper multi-device support almost a decade ago, long before it became mainstream. Fully FOSS too, including the server. For some reason it never became popular. They don't have proper desktop clients (just the usual Electron mess), but then, which one of them does except for Telegram?

https://github.com/wireapp/wire-server , etc.

Why would they need history of their shitposts? It loses actuality in a day, maximum in a week.

This is correct and applies to security in general. Security is one facet of reliability.

I mean, E2E is the entire point of Signal. if you don't think E2E is important then Signal is the wrong app. Personally given the current political climate I think having the technical knowledge to understand what E2E is and not wanting E2E is bonkers. High chance of people getting killed or jailed in the US for mainstream political positions in the near future.

Signal seems to work alright for me, although I felt the desktop app gets a bit annoying because of too many frequent updates happening to the app, which I believe is based on Electron.

But besides this, there is really a strong need for a web client, just like Telegram or WhatsApp. If only the protocol can be extended in such a way that it allows for integrating into a web app, that would be incredibly great.

I have been particularly impressed with the device migration experience. I have an 18gb db, and even the time my device died I managed to get things over correctly.

I've been using it since it was called TextSecure.

I had no issues at all since it's called Signal. I have no idea what people do with it to cause problems at all.

It would still be interesting to find out.

I've been on Android only btw.

"I've been lucky not to have devices lost/stolen/bricked. Why can't other people just be lucky like me?"

Shouldn't your client have no problem saving a chat history? It is, by definition, able to read every message you send and receive.

I used the OTR plugin a lot.

Dino (XMPP, https://dino.im) is a great desktop client to talk to other XMPP clients, in particular Conversations, due to its broad support of XEPs.

Conversations has an issue where the main tool for reading a backup on a computer (ceb2txt (so, say, I can properly and correctly archive a text dump archive of a person I loved who died)), will not work for me. I filed a support request and there's been no movement on it whatsoever and it genuinely seems like nobody gives a shit. Restoring a backup even with all the images and media files in the correct place with the correct filenames will then refuse to show any filenames.

This is par for the course with chat backups, though.

Messenger - Bad - No way to save chat responses of people you have talked to. This means you only ever have one side of a conversation, making it meaningless.

Twitter DMs - Bad - See Messenger.

Jami - Ehhhh - Saves a git local repository of messages. The only problem is message syncing is effing abysmal.

Dino (XMPP) - Bad - Does not allow backing anything up, this is "intentional". Depending on which protocol you use, as soon as you move to another device all the messages you _had_ are retroactively converted to Cannot Decrypt. They're my effing messages!

Discord - Good - Discord History Tracker (tedious to use but slurps everything up into a sqlite3 database that is itself, an official archival format)

WhatsApp - Good - Dumps a text record + files/images/etc. onto the phone's filesystem. This is reasonably easy to archive.

Signal - Mediocre - If you have an old Signal backup from 2018? That you could only transfer off your phone by deleting old messages? lmao you're effed. Load up a version from ten years ago, gradually update it and then maybe, MAYBE you can extract the sqlite3 archive? These days you have a .signalbackup or whatever which is an encrypted archive, and I assume that there's a tool to decrypt it, but uhhhhhh. Last I tried to use it it required way more RAM than I had accessible.

+1 for Deltachat

I love beeper and have been using it for a very long time at this point, but I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a good client.

Whatsapp mentions don’t work (just show the name of the mention to the other users), and polls or albums don’t work.

Messenger disconnects every couple of days at this point.

Pasting links won’t always expand.

Attachments are always hit or miss.

So many small other things. Still love it.

hiq's comment was not about Whisperfish but about the presage library. My comment can be read as "Whisperfish wrote their own implementation of the signal protocol" - which is wrong. (Sorry, can't edit it anymore)

With presage, Whisperfish has a high-level Rust library that wraps the official libsignal libraries (which are also written in Rust) and makes it much easier to write clients. The official Signal repo only contains Java/Typescript/Swift wrappers. As presage is rather obscure, I thought that some HN readers might appreciate the link.

The app doesn't even recognize geo:.. links, which makes degoogling rather hard.

Looks like this is the first commit where it was added: https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon-android/commit/a0cbf0fa...

Please consider supporting https://unifiedpush.org/ in addition to/instead of FCM.

> What, should we also just use telegram where E2EE is off by default?

There are plenty of others, all with their pros and cons.

Ultimately,the network effect is usually the hardest parameter to overcome.

Ironically, the only person who mentionned wanting to use signal instead of whatsapp in my network circle is my 71y old mother.

> - still scrapes metadata

> - run by company who's entire objective is to profile you

And? Pick your poison. Being profiled by Meta isn't high enough on my threat board to be worth switching to E2EE as a countermeasure; in fact, I only use E2EE because Meta forced it on me with Whatsapp (new network effects) and by enabling it in Messenger (old network effects).

But that's besides the point. The point is, I did not expect such an alignment of outcomes between user-hostile corporations and grassroots OSS developers, as both fight to saturate the IM space with network effects-driven apps that disenfranchise end users "because security".

I imagine Signal is also more than happy about remote attestation and upcoming Android developer verification? All more ways to protect the integrity of the network and ensure the user isn't accidentally stripping E2EE by doing something silly like perusing their messages in ways not prescribed by the developer?

> What, should we also just use telegram where E2EE is off by default?

I don't like it because it made other choices that led to their larger network being infested with scammers and all kinds of shady types, but at least the client itself doesn't suck :).

> Surprised how many people don't seem to know about it.

There are a few reasons for that.

1. The link to APK cannot be found on the official site[0], so it needs to be looked up in a search engine.

2. Even when downloading from the site, they try to scare you away with a warning [1]. The reason for warning could be avoided by hosting their own F-droid repo, but they refused it, claiming you can download APK and not listening to reason[2].

Though for people using F-droid can still get Signal through the Guardian repository [3]

Thing about the signal APK and the Guardian one is that, it still have the so called "crap" in the final APK, it just runs a background service when required google services are not detected, causing battery drain for many[4].

The drain could also be avoided by supporting UnifiedPush (it can fall back to FCM when it's detected), but they don't want to do that either[5].

[0] https://signal.org/download/

[1] https://signal.org/android/apk/

[2] https://community.signalusers.org/t/how-to-get-signal-apks-o...

[3] https://guardianproject.info/fdroid/

[4] https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/9729

[5] https://community.signalusers.org/t/use-gcm-fcm-alternatives...

  > Surprised how many people don't seem to know about it.

That’s a bug, not a feature. I don’t wish to give OWS permanent RCE on my devices.

Signal server certifies public key of your contact. How many times have you verified security numbers of your contacts?

For a security app, it's pretty rational to need to be updated. One of the most common patterns in basically every technological attack is to take a freshly discovered vulnerability and target devices that haven't been updated yet.

  > they want an app that never NEEDS to be updated

You can get pretty close if you're in a static environment like a machine that never connects to the internet and the hardware never changes and no other software on the machine changes, but neither a phone nor a communication platform allow for that.

They use the phone to do their person vetting. It helps reduce bots because you have to have phone numbers[0]. It's not perfect but it does create a barrier to entry. That's unfortunately how security works, there's nothing impenetrable, there are only things that make certain things harder. The best security is where something is impracticable, not impossible (e.g. brute forcing a large password is not impossible, but it is impracticable). But at the same time you run into problems like that.

[0] They also use it as a means to help with the social graph. Building a social graph is pretty difficult and you don't want to do it completely from scratch. This is the same reason social media wants you to import your phone contacts and email contacts. The difference is that the "side benefit" to that is that they get data harvesting rather than security.

  | > We're unable to provide a specific timeline. 
  > I'm not sure if it's true, but it feels a bit suspect.

Honestly, the best solution to this would have been to buy a cheap phone or something like a VOIP number. I don't know your situation but it seems like it is not that easy to go a year without a phone number. I definitely think Signal should do better in this but I don't think the result is unreasonable. It brings up an edge case they probably didn't consider but having a phone number "abandoned" for a year sounds like it is a very low probability situation. Being reliant on phone numbers they also have to garbage collect, right? Because a phone number is not a unique identification to a person for their life. So while I do agree your situation sucks and is very frustrating I hope you can recognize that it is (from my best guess) a very unlikely situation. That the phone number is being sat on but unused and that the squatting is happening by a legitimate person rather than a scammer.

They can do better, for sure, but I don't think I'd judge a platform harshly by the results of an extremely odd outlier situation.

  > update thats infected by some government trojan?

Unfortunately you don't. But this is true for ANY app.

Fortunately, Signal is open source. So you can go read the lines of code. Unfortunately this is a lot of work. But fortunately if you believe a certain checkpoint is secure (your current install) you only need to read the new things. You can also build from source if you don't trust the app store.

Fortunately with open source you also get the benefit of others. Maybe you don't look through everything, but there's definitely other people looking through some things. And with something like Signal, you can be pretty certain that there will be a big uproar if something devious is pushed.

You always need trust, unfortunately. But with closed source you have to trust one entity and get no way to verify. With open source you have to trust very few and can even verify yourself.

The problem is that you're not only putting yourself at risk when you don't update.

You're putting everyone who you've talked to at risk. I don't know about you, but I prefer not having to worry about whether I'm communicating with someone whose installation can easily be pwned by any halfway incompetent attacker.

  > update or not shouldn't be taken away from users.

  > Let users make the trade off between those downsides and the risk of zero days.

If you don't want to update, that's fine. But your preference for not updating doesn't get to override my preference for secure communication. It is literally the whole point of Signal... if you don't want security and privacy then don't use Signal, that's your choice and no one is forcing you to use the app.

Then signal must be very insecure, poorly coded app in first place, that needs to updated every or every other day. They also don't give any explanation of what that updates are.

Email has been updated many times in the last 20 years. All of the major sender authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) were created and deployed over the last 20 years. Email is also famously insecure and lacking a standard way of managing encryption - so the reason you never see updates is because the features signal is changing do not exist in email at all.

You're running 2005 versions of your mail-daemon in prod?

Debian and Gentoo

There will likely never be federation between Signal's official servers and any other servers. Signal introduces privacy features semiregularly; we all saw with Matrix how difficult that is in a highly-federated environment.

No. But iirc Molly can connect to a federated version. You just have to pick. It's one or the other

Well, obviously not. Official Signal does not support federation.

Yeah, that is why I started using Molly.

[dead]

Your android is the master and desktop is a slave to it, no?

I have multiple android devices and I can only log into signal on one. I can have as many desktop slaves as I want tho.

100% I checked again 3 days ago when setting up Signal on a new Android device. It still does not support it while Molly does.

Database encryption isn't comparable to the keyboard drama. Protecting against malware in your keyboard can be done by using a different meyboard and is of course out of scope.

But if my phone gets taken and an exploit is used to get root access on it, I don't want the messages to be readable and there's nothing I can do about it. It's not like I can just use a different storage backend.

It's also a very simple solution - just let me set an encryption password. It's not an open-ended problem like protecting from malware running on the device when you're using it.

You're absolutely right that the appropriate level of security does depend on someone's threat model, but I do want to point out that you don't need to be an activist to benefit from privacy.

I'm a really big fan of the airport bathroom analogy. When you use the restroom in the airport, you close the stall door behind you.

You're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide, and everyone knows what you're doing. But you take actions to preserve your privacy anyway, and that's good.

Everyone deserves privacy, and the psychological comfort that comes with it. Dance like nobody's watching, encrypt like everyone is :)

Depends on quite a few other factors, but if someone with a GrayKey or Cellebrite appliance gets your phone, there's a good chance they can get in both in BFU and AFU states, even if locked. Once unlocked (or broken into), stock Signal offers you zero protection, while Molly forces them to start a brute force attack against the password you gave Molly.

This is less true for fully patched GrapheneOS devices than it is for fully patched iOS and other Android devices, but this space is basically a constantly evolving cat and mouse game. We don't get a press release when GrayKey or Cellebrite develop a new zero day, so defense in depth can be helpful even for hardened platforms like GOS.

Used to be supported in Android (and how I had my phones setup before). Since Android 13 it's no longer possible https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/encryption...

Their justification here https://source.android.com/docs/security/features/encryption is that

> Upon boot, the user must provide their credentials before any part of the disk is accessible.

> While this is great for security, it means that most of the core functionality of the phone is not immediately available when users reboot their device. Because access to their data is protected behind their single user credential, features like alarms could not operate, accessibility services were unavailable, and phones could not receive calls.

I'm sure they could have found a better approach, instead of file based encryption, but must have been nice to simplify engineering overhead and giving 3 letter agencies, at the same time, something that simplifies their work.

No they don't. The current releases for android and iOS both use file based encryption on most supported phones.

I mentioned some of the pragmatic constraints of fully trusting typical Android / iOS FDE to fully protect the confidentiality of Signal messages in another comment above that I would encourage you to read.

That said, Molly definitely isn't designed for the average person's threat model, that's totally true, but it's also worth noting that just because someone isn't aware of a certain risk in their threat model, that doesn't mean they will never benefit from taking steps to proactively protect themselves from that risk.

IMO, security and privacy are best conceptualized not as binary properties where you either have it or you don't, but rather as journeys, where every step in the right direction is a good one.

I'd always encourage everyone to question their own assumptions about security and never stop learning, it's good for your brain even if you ultimately decide that you don't want to accept the tradeoffs of an approach like the one Molly takes towards at-rest encryption.

They also require running the app on a "real phone" for registration. Most emulators put you in captcha hell

Damn, what a shame... Another vote for Session, I guess. Idk what flaws that one has but it seems to be the leading alternative to Signal.

Unfortunately...

Yeah, the Signal team's roadmap seems very strange to me as an outsider. There are some low hanging fruits which they just seem to refuse to fix.

And given how in this case Molly could fix it it cannot have been that hard to fix.

I just tried it on a 2nd phone and it seems to work.

No, it won't let me backup my data. It lets them backup my data and I still cannot access it outside of the Signal app.

Oracle, Nintendo and Apple have all tried this "copyrighted text / logo / poem" thing, never works out for them. For interoperability you're allowed to replicate those parts.