April 14, 2022
Four Attacks and a Proof for Telegram
Martin R. Albrecht, Lenka Mareková, Kenneth G. Paterson, Igors Stepanovs
More information at:
https://mtpsym.github.io/
Based on the paper to appear at IEEE S&P 2022.
RWC 2022
Royal Holloway, University
of London; ETH Zürich
Background
Important advantages of
Telegram:
-
Support of
public and private group chats for up to 200’000 people (
Signal up to 1’000;
WhatsApp up to 256).
-
Pseudonimity: can use a pseudonym, not revealing phone number to others (not supported in
Signal and
WhatsApp).
-
Other features:
anonymous polls; disappearing messages;
timed or scheduled messages; ability to delete messages sent by others.
Monthly active users in Jan 2022:
WhatsApp
WeChat
FB Messenger
QQ
Snapchat
Telegram
According to Statista 2022.
Telegram was the predominant messaging application
used in the Hong Kong protests in 2019-2020.
Telegram was perceived to provide more security than its competitors.
Common use cases: large
public groups
up to
50’000 members, and small
private groups
.
Cloud Chats and Secret Chats
Telegram FAQ (
https://core.telegram.org/techfaq
)
“Q: Why are you not using X? (insert solution)
While other ways of achieving the same cryptographic goals,
undoubtedly, exist, we feel that the present solution is both
robust and also sucсeeds at our secondary task of beating
unencrypted messengers in terms of delivery time and stability.”
