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168

Telegram is indistinguishable from an FSB honeypot (rys.io)

submitted 3 days ago by rysiek@szmer.info to c/technology@beehaw.org

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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.

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[–] adry@piefed.social 8 points 3 days ago (5 children)

I hate it when I don't know an acronym, but this one is particularly hurtful to my brain since everyone is saying "yeah, that link to the FSB was obvious glad someone demonstrated it." So... I will just assume FSB=KGB and be done.

Anyway, most of our privacy "war fronts" are honeypots in one way or another. Take for example Tor network (high number of exit nodes are controlled). Except those apps or protocols that are truly decentralized (e.g. OMEMO in XMPP), these are good. But then again, they lag behind to our standards of "normal" Internet that connects us to the world, outside of our tiny circles of nerds.

Now, the thing with honeypots, is that they are there to catch some specific type of fly. If you were to use their network to take advantage of the features for anything that the "predator" behind doesn't care, you're fine. So, I will keep using Telegram for the memes and piracy channels...

From an OPSec perspective this is important news nonetheless and I will keep it in mind.

[–] SaltSong@startrek.website 10 points 3 days ago

If you were to use their network to take advantage of the features for anything that the “predator” behind doesn’t care, you’re fine.

But what will the predator care about tomorrow? Or next year? And how confident are you that aggregate data is not what they want, for whatever reason?

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