This blog is reserved for more serious things, and ordinarily I wouldn’t spend time on questions like the above. But much as I’d like to spend my time writing about exciting topics, som…

Blog post by crypto professor Matthew Green, discussing what Telegram does (I wasn’t familiar with it) and criticizing its cryptography. He says Telegram by default is not end-to-end encrypted. It does have an end-to-end “secret chat” feature, but it’s a nuisance to activate and only works for two-person chats (not groups) where both people are online when the chat starts.

It still isn’t clear to me why Telegram’s founder was arrested. Green expresses some concern over that but doesn’t give any details that weren’t in the headlines.

  • Daemon Silverstein
    1·
    4 months ago

    PGP/GPG encryption. It works with any IM, social network, anything (at least if the platform/program/app/medium allows for sufficiently lengthy messages so to carry the encrypted payload). There are some IMs that bring PGP/GPG natively, as well as extensions for existing IMs that also adds PGP/GPG feature, but PGP/GPG doesn’t need to be native to the app to convey encrypted messages, it’s a base64 text. It’s really an E2EE.