Clickbait title.
The correct title would be 'Exclusive: Hackers accessed Telegram messaging accounts in Iran - researchers' which itself already hides the fact that the problem lies not with Telegram infrastructure, but the interception of SMS by state telcos.
Threema does not rely on SMS for login, the identities are not phone number based and trust can be ensured by manually scanning the public key QR of the peer, leading to a clear visual trust level indicator.
Applications should not rely on SMS for authentication or login, or on the phone number for identity.
I have a couple SIM cards since I live on the US/Canada border. WhatsApp and Telegram won't let me send messages when I switch SIMs and there is no other way to verify my identity.
Yes. Duh. If you don't offer users a way to confirm key fingerprints directly with each other (or at least require signatures from a verification service that does actual verification), you don't offer an encryption system.
Signal notifies you on key changes. Whatsapp has an option (I think) to do so.
Anyways the simple fix that might work somewhat is "alert the user". Telegram could tell the old user they have added a device. Or even require some time period where they wait for a response from the existing device, perhaps calibrated to their usage.
After registering a new device, a warning can be displayed to contacts for the first few messages. Maybe old messages are not accessible or something.
There are ways to limit the impact of an SMS hijack.
When you add a device, you do get notified a new device was added, and if you have an existing telegram device, all future devices won't use SMS as the authorisation channel. I think the problem here is that the attackers added a device before the "original" person did.
However, allowing for a reverse-lookup of a phone numbers through its API is a privacy—and security—problem Telegram is directly responsible for, IMHO.
Yeah didn't Signal spend a bit of work trying to avoid exposing users?
If you have an existing Telegram device (registered before target registered), then how do they register? And wouldn't both devices get notified? Also how would they know which numbers to register?
Just fundamentally seems like the software can notify you of how many devices have access, and make that visible on any change and when installing on a device. Perhaps even offering to kill existing devices.
I know that some people here are suspicious of Telegram because they use their own encryption mechanism, but it's like there's an active campaign against it by the media. In my country the media has been calling it the "ISIS chatting app".
Nothing to do with that. Authentication is an essential pillar of a security app, and the ability to effectively authenticate is an important component of opsec. If SMS is compromised (and it is not hard to imagine given how protective govt is about SMS exploits/sigint) then the authentication aspect of any app that relies on SMS is also potentially compromised. Weakest link and all that...
It's just media doing the thing it always does. Inducing outrage in any way possible. It's too late to call Facebook Messenger an "ISIS chatting app", but consider that e.g. whenever Facebook adds any kind of even remotely useful feature to their service, they're immediately portrayed as stalker paradise by the media.
IMO you're unjustifiably downvoted. As a previous reply already said, other services rely on sms auth as well. So why is only Telegram critizised? You can see from previous HN top stories that the mistrust in this service seems especially high.
Ah, yes. Then let's add the cardiovascular system since humans rely on it to press screens or keys to use telegram. What else has been potentially hacked ? The moon ?
They didn't break SMS wholesale; they got access to one telco's network. Saying they were hacked is like saying Slack/Netflix/etc were hacked whenever a single email provider is hacked.
That said, SMS isn't a very secure channel for one-time passwords. Enable 2 factor auth.
If they rely to a great extent on an unsafe protocol which ultimately leads to the theft of sensitive data, that does represent a problem _within_ Telegram, doesn't it?
When an adversary intercepts a Telegram SMS authentication code, this gives them pretty much complete access to a user's entire Telegram messaging history. This is true because messages are not end-to-end encrypted by default. The Telegram servers will happily return perennially stored transcripts to any client that is even temporarily considered valid.
This is _not_ true for messaging applications that are end-to-end encrypted by default and that do not store plaintext on their servers. This isn't a subtle difference. Lots of comparisons in this thread fall victim to a sort of implied false equivocation.
Using SMS as a form of authentication may be a quality that Telegram shares with other popular messaging applications, but it is uniquely susceptible to all of the associated pitfalls.
I'll never understand why LastPass requires you to be a premium user to use some forms of their 2FA (for example, I can't use my Yubikey if I don't pay for a premium, and I don't need a premium account for literally anything else).
Well, a lot of MFA is done through SMS. I believe sides like Tumblr and Twitter do that? At least I am asked to do SMS authentication for those sites. Maybe it's a setting I checked off.
And yet it is the only kind of 2FA offered by any of the "serious" institutions I do business with. TOTP is only available on toys, other than AWS. Sigh.
"Telegram breached", "Hackers break into Telegram", "Iranian Hackers Just Cracked Telegram". I didn't think any of these nonsense titles would reach the first page of Hacker News.
One might argue that it's clickbait, but the original title does not claim anything that's particularly nonsensical. All that it claimed was that a data-breach affecting Telegram users (considerable number of) has been identified.
How about: "Iranian citizens pay the price for Telegram's weak security".
"Telegram's exaggerated security claims gave Iranian users false sense of security, now Iranian secret police have read their messages." isn't quite concise enough.
Once again proving a) the security of a system, like a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and b) if something is theoretically broken now it will be actually broken tomorrow.
>The researchers said they also found evidence that the hackers took advantage of a programing interface built into Telegram to identify at least 15 million Iranian phone numbers with Telegram accounts registered to them, as well as the associated user IDs.
Me thinks that's more important than someone intercepting an SMS - at least in terms specific to Telegram. Is there more information on this? What evidence is it?
It's part of their contacts API, where you submit the numbers you have in your contacts list and they let you know which numbers already have a telegram account.
They have since added rate limiting to prevent brute forcing it, but it sounds like the API itself is still available.
Iranian here, as programmer and software security hobbyist, I always warned my friends against telegram. Sadly the local news is government used that bug and clone 15M person chat record/contacts/public data and etc.
This is pretty huge, this can put many lives in danger, I know people who are gay and use telegram. If you are any kind of person who government does not agree with you , from now on , government has your personal communication record. For example when you applying for regular job(which 90% of jobs in Iran is related to government , because of state controlled economy)then you have absolute no chance, even if you are much better candidate than some stupid person who spend their lives defending government stupid ideas.
P.S. Replace all "government" with "regime". Government in Iran is actually good (in compare to regime) and Rouhani is our only hope. The problem is Revolutionary Guard.
Does SSL access to hacker news protect your identity in Iran? And do you think encrypted messages with telegram with 2 factor auth protects people? I think not, since they just have to get the messages of the people you chat with, the weaker link is the other side.
> widely used in the Middle East, including by the Islamic State militant group
I understand the risk associated with rogue people using such a service, but is not the ability to determine who exactly is using the service counter productive? I.e. for journalists and personas non grata under oppressive regimes.
Are you sure it's being "determined", in a SIGINT sense? Perhaps ISIS have made public mention somewhere of their usage of the service. Or perhaps others (e.g. opposing forces) have just shoulder-surfed some ISIS members using it, or looked through their phones.
Anything that involves SMS, SS7 and the legacy PSTN phone network cannot be relied upon for anything crypto related... Sending auth keys/codes by SMS, really? I understand it was a decision made to have the system be easy to use, but it's foolish in my opinion.
I realize this was a use of sending short authentication codes by SMS, but at 160 characters the crypto can't be solid, if somebody decided to implement proper public/private key over it. So the transport is definitely a problem.
Signal was originally TextSecure, there was no problem with its message security. Plenty of meta data problems though. If you still need to send secure SMS there is a fork at https://silence.im.
One might suppose that because login relies on the cellular network it's implicitly part of the app's infrastructure. In that sense the technical failing of Telegram was relying on one method of authentication (when multi-factor should be the default). I think it far-fetched to extrapolate that into 'Telegram got hacked', though.
I understand the want to share the article, but a concerted effort to amend the original title to reflect the actual content would have been appropriate here, methinks.
Strictly, this isn't a breach in Telegram, as it relies on the adversary being able to own the cell network you're on, but that may not bring much comfort to many of the people who feel they might need to use Telegram.
What other systems would people suggest to do this initial setup?
This is precisely a breach of Telegram, they are essentially sending auth keys to the adversary when the adversary asks them too.
New devices should only be authorised with the use of an authentication token from an existing client device; one needs to decide if the new device should have access to old messages. Ideally it would be clear to all parties as to which devices and identities have joined a chat.
Is there a way to know how many devices are linked to an account and which devices they are? That would let people check if they've been eavesdropped and possibly cut off the hacker by removing the extra device. Then add a password.
Yet in this case all the encrypted secret chats are still kept private. Because even gaining access to the user account, doesn't allow you to read messages from secret chats.
