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this post was submitted on 11 May 2025
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Privacy
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A timing attack is extremely realistic when you control one of the end devices which is a common scenario if a person gets arrested or their device compromised. This way you can then identify who the contacts are and with the phone number you can easily get the real name and movement patterns.
This is like the ideal setup for law inforcement, and it is well documented that honeypot "encrypted" messengers have been set up for similar purposes before. Signal was probably not explicitly set up for that, but the FBI for sure has an internal informant that could run those timing attacts.
You are talking out of your ass. First, a timing attack requires numbers to correlate - reasonable numbers of people using a node or server and a LOT of packets going back and forth. Neither are true for a Signal server. Second, they don’t get the phone numbers if contacts are using only their username (with phone number sharing disabled). Your criticisms are over the top and not at all nuanced to the degree of protection of metadata that was built into signal. If it was as bad as you imply, a whole heck of a lot of the most respected security researchers would have to be complete idiots.
Lol, confidently saying stuff you obviously have no idea about and just believing Signal's "trust me bro" nonsense. Have fun using that honeypot.
(Those "security researchers" you are referring to have no access to the Signal infrastructure and usually only look at the cryptographic algorithms used by Signal, which are indeed good and used by other systems as well these days).