
Signal partners with Microsoft to bring end-to-end encryption to Skype - Aissen
https://signal.org/blog/skype-partnership/
======
paule89
The thing is. How will Microsoft and Skype handle backdoors now. As far as I
understood the reason Microsoft broke Skype so badly was because they used
centralised servers with backdoors for countries who wanted them. Not always
the good countries.

But this. This baffles me. Deeply.

~~~
Systemic33
Microsoft used centralised servers because the Skype prior to that was a curse
to mobile devices running on battery power. Particularly cellphones.

Skype worked as a p2p network, where some peers where marked as super peers
and would help with peers behind firewalls (UDP-holepunching), and routing
through the super peer. If your phone became a super peer, you could expect to
essentially work like a server, with the "benefits" of increased bandwidth
usage and power usage. Not exactly what you want as a mobile user.

So Microsoft had to change the architecture (which wasn't designed with mobile
devices in mind) into a more centralised approach that could work with mobile
devices.

~~~
huhtenberg
This doesn't explain why after the change Skype started routing calls between
machines on the same LAN through Microsoft servers.

~~~
afuchs
It is difficult to make a p2p app on a mobile device work _even between
devices on the same LAN_.

A simplified explanation: Mobile devices will often ignore almost all incoming
network traffic to reduce battery usage. The only way to reliably communicate
with the device is through a centralized push notification service (e.g. APN
and GCM).

~~~
lukedoolittle
I tried to make a demo app to perform very simple HTTP p2p and found this
difficult on iOS. When an app is backgrounded you have ~17 seconds to stop
execution or the OS will kill any active threads UNLESS the activity is among
the Apple permitted exceptions. (Note that there is no iOS SyncThing app). In
Android it is possible to use IntentService as a single threaded background
HTTP server. It works for the most part but can be a little flakey. I'm not
100% sure how the OpenGarden SDK accomplishes this but I'm interested. My
guess is that it makes heavy use of Bluetooth, which is one of the Apple
permitted exceptions to the backgrounding rule.

~~~
zimpenfish
> there is no iOS SyncThing app

There’s fsync() but it only syncs when you launch the app - what I think you
meant is “there’s no continuously syncing iOS SyncThing app”.

~~~
lukedoolittle
Yes, thanks for the clarification. Continuous/background syncing is the
difficult task.

------
tptacek
Just to get a sense of the track record here, Signal Protocol powers:

* Facebook/WhatsApp

* Google/Allo

* Microsoft/Skype

* Signal

Signal is also the basis for the protocols for Wire (Proteus) and Matrix
(Olm).

~~~
cJ0th
Can't say I am really happy about it. The more the Signal protocol is used the
more money is spend on attacking it.

~~~
azernik
"If you haven't been hacked by the Chinese you got to ask yourself, does the
shit you're doing really even matter?"

I prefer for Signal to be attacked and to matter than to be unattacked and to
be irrelevant.

~~~
dmix
Indeed, it's incredibly selfish and naive to depend on security by obscurity
here when you can significantly up the bar from basically one step above full-
text all-access for every global spy agency... to a serious encryption system.

Regardless, the exposure ship sailed long ago anyway when WhatsApp with their
billions of users, including plenty of terrorist groups in the middle east and
africa, decided to adopt the platform.

Additionally, breaking crypto systems like this in practice, if possible,
pretty much _always_ means targeted attacks. Which is a significant difference
from the type of mass surveillance which Skype et al currently allow.

Even Blackberry bragged about building a system for the NSA/CSEC to provide
real-time data access to every BBM being sent in the Toronto area during G20.
It's very likely that Skype has a similar system and this change (should) make
that fundamentally infeasible.

------
KeitIG
Maybe a good opportunity to remember what is the main mission of Signal/Open
Whisper Systems: they realized at the time that it was extremely complicated
for non-technical people to use tools secure enough and respecting your
privacy (PGP...), and that the tools used by everyone (Whatsapp, Messenger...)
were popular because they were fun and easy to use.

They believed that everyone should be able to have an easy way to communicate
with everyone, with a nice UI/UX, AND have an app secure and respectful of
your privacy. And this, leaded to the Signal protocal and the Signal app .

~~~
lucb1e
While on the topic of things to remember, also remember that they're making
compromises in order to keep things hidden from users.

The Signal protocol may be sound, but as we've seen with today's WhatsApp
news, there are still implementation-specific compromises being made. Not to
mention that many of those companies ship a closed source product. They could
publish a spec of what should be going over the wire to make it auditable
without needing to go all open source, but they don't do that either. Things
are really kept closed. I am not sure whether it's a net positive or a net
negative when another user joins WhatsApp or a similar service, versus
Telegram where encryption is opt-in but at least it's open source and not
leaking metadata to BigCorps whose profit model is knowing you.

~~~
KeitIG
Though I understand your points, Signal is a protocol, you can implement and
build things around it the way you want. Sure you can say that WhisperSystems
should enforce a secured architecture around it, but it is not their job, and
I doubt Whatsapp, Messenger and Skype would be using Signal if they were
forcing that.

And I would definitely not say Telegram is the best tool here [1][2]. If you
want something really secure, I would recommend the Signal app [3].

In the end, it is always who you decide to put your trust in.

[1] [https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-
telegr...](https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-
secure#49802) [2]
[https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1177.pdf)
[3] [https://signal.org/](https://signal.org/)

------
aplorbust
Wikipedia: "Signal relies on centralized servers that are maintained by Open
Whisper Systems."

Would it be possible to use the same open source proto and crypto that Signal
chose, but in a way that does not rely on _third parties_ to run servers, such
as OWS, WhatsApp, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, etc.?

~~~
ReverseCold
Yes, but decentralization is a difficult problem. I think eventually it will
become like email, where everyone just uses GMail.

NAT, Firewall, etc all make it very difficult to do true P2P as well.

~~~
figgis
>I think eventually it will become like email, where everyone just uses GMail.

Or Outlook(Office365), Ymail, Zoho, GMX, iCloud, Yandex, Proton.

~~~
newscracker
Or Posteo, Mailbox.org, Tutanota, Riseup.net, etc.

~~~
tho9Ohx1eo
Or self-hosted.

~~~
sgtmas2006
A lot of people are listing plenty of alternatives for email, but the majority
of people aren't going to be this broad in email usage.

------
kwindla
Over the last couple of years, there's been huge progress in making end-to-end
encryption practical for "real world" apps -- especially stuff running in web
browsers. Signal is part of that, of course, as is WebRTC, a standard that to
its great credit did an excellent job with the encryption pieces from the very
beginning.

We built our video calling app, Daily.co, on top of WebRTC and so we could
relatively easily include end-to-end encryption from the day we launched.

A few things make e2e harder as you scale up. One is that metadata gets more
and more important, for a lot of reasons, as you add features and try to grow
a business. As has been pointed out here, Skype _was_ end-to-end encrypted in
the pre-Microsoft days.

Another challenge is that it's a lot easier to build e2e encryption for mesh
network topologies than if you're routing things through central servers. For
video calling, mesh networking breaks down as you add more users to a call.
For us, that means we're e2e encrypted up to 4 people in a call. After that,
we're forwarding video streams through our servers in the cloud, and we don't
do e2e encryption anymore. (Not that we wouldn't like to, it's just a much
heavier development lift.)

~~~
jmiserez
Why not just forward the e2e encrypted video streams through your servers?
Encrypted or not, wouldn’t the amount of traffic be the same?

------
somberi
If anyone from Skype product-team is reading this - Please bring back the
ability to dial from the local contacts, without having to Sync my entire
address book. This is my minimum request.

If possible, just put the old Skype interface back. The new design with all
its jazz-matazz and sparkles have made the product unusable. It is not a
first-world unusable I am talking about. The product is not usable, as in I am
moving away from Skype after being a customer who has given thousands of
dollars in business over the years.

How did the new Skype design pass user feedback reviews? Honestly asking to
learn.

~~~
nyolfen
it's unbelievable how badly skype functions as a PC IM client. it just keeps
getting worse and worse. there's zero reason an IM client should be using
hundreds of megs of ram and a hideous, garish UI that you can't turn off.

the only workaround i found was the pidgin skype-web plugin, which can be a
little buggy, but it's far preferable if all you use skype for is IM.

~~~
javindo
Not sure if it's the same client, but the Skye for Business client is also
just as bad.

I used to work on a virtualised Windows machine (work mandated) and the only
usable accessibility option was a high DPI setting. The old Lync client worked
perfectly with this, obviously dating back to an age where they cared about
accessibility. Skype for business completely ignored system DPI settings, made
certain things huge with other things being tiny.

The spacing was the biggest issue - literally 30-40% of my 43" monitor would
often be taken up by spacing around icons etc on the app.

It really felt as though they just stopped putting as much effort into UX,
accessibility, usability. Lync felt like a professional IM client, Skype for
Business felt like a half baked bodge.

------
wilhil
Now if only they can partner with someone to get chat working as well as it
used to or get syncing between multiple devices working...

~~~
antimatter
This. I wish Signal's own native apps had the user experience of Telegram.

~~~
rickycook
or that telegram just used the signal protocol; either is fine in my book

~~~
antimatter
Yes, that would be great as well but I’ve long since given up on that
happening.

------
legionof7
I made a request for e2e to Discord a while back. It became one of the most
voted suggestions but got denied. Maybe this will push them to take another
look.

~~~
kenning
I'm not knowledgeable about this -- is signal's e2e encryption even viable for
a service with N users, and one where new users are being added?

Put another way, if I have a group with 10 users and it's encrypted and then
another person joins and can see the old messages, was it actually securely
encrypted in the first place?

~~~
aeorgnoieang
> if I have a group with 10 users and it's encrypted and then another person
> joins and can see the old messages, was it actually securely encrypted in
> the first place?

Sure, why not? Assume, just because it's the first thing that came to mind,
that message history is encrypted using GPG and every message is encrypted
with everyone's individual public keys. When a new user joins, one user just
encrypts the message history with the new user's public key.

Or am I missing something? Do the existing users in the group _not_ have
access to their own message history?

~~~
jarcoal
You’re not missing anything, this is definitely possible to do.

That said, encrypting every message with everyone’s public key doesn’t scale,
so instead you’d likely want to generate a symmetric key for the group and as
new users are invited the inviter would encrypt the group key with the
invitee’s public key. That makes it trivial for new users to view history, and
as new chats are posted they only need to be encrypted with one key.

------
mwcmitchell
skype had this already before ms. ms opened skype up to government ages ago so
this doesn't mean much of anything, there are backdoors.
[https://youtu.be/J1q4Ir2J8P8?t=2880](https://youtu.be/J1q4Ir2J8P8?t=2880)

~~~
devy
Yeah, I was gonna say Skype communication protocol was proprietary and
encrypted until Microsoft bought them and rewrite a lot of it.

------
Jeaye
Skype is proprietary software. Even if it encrypts my messages E2E, it still
needs to display them with its proprietary UI and see them in plain text.
There's no way I could trust that or recommend anyone else to.

The thing about E2E encryption is that you still need to have reasonable trust
in each E.

~~~
Digital-Citizen
I concur.

It's interesting that so many people who claim they understand what the
software is doing don't appear to understand that proprietary software is
always untrustworthy. Users have no real control over proprietary software, no
matter how technical and willing they are to change their copy of the
software.

Therefore it doesn't matter which apps are installed on a proprietary OS. The
proprietary OS (or possibly some hardware beneath it) is untrustworthy. Every
keystroke, drag/gesture, location change, camera/mic input, and more pass
through proprietary software before they get to the ostensibly trustworthy
app.

------
aplorbust
More than a few comments trying to rationalize why Skype is different under
Microsoft. (Supernodes are controlled by Microsoft, not users.) Also some
comments exhibiting misconceptions about the relative feasibility of peer-to-
peer networking today compared to the past.

Some users want peer-to-peer networks that are controlled by users, not third
parties such as Microsoft, Facebook, etc. It seems that corporations are also
interested in such networks. But they just want the users, not the ability to
exclude third parties (they _are_ a third party).

What is important for these interested users is that _Skype changed_ and _how_
it changed, not _why_ changed.

No explanation, rationale or excuse is a substitute for a peer-to-peer network
_that is controlled by its users_ , not third parties.

We know why these user-controlled networks get acquired (or copied) by
companies: because they work and they attract many users.

------
erikb
You know, before Microsoft Skype had end to end encryption.

~~~
Whitestrake
For a minute, I thought your comment had simply trailed off without finishing
your thought.

Then I realised it wasn't "Microsoft Skype", but rather, "before Microsoft,
Skype had..."

~~~
erikb
I see, thanks for the info. Comma setting in English is rather unexpected for
me. It works different in German, but I'll try to adapt. Maybe in English you
would also say "end-to-end encryption" rather than "end to end encryption", is
that correct?

~~~
Whitestrake
Both are commonly used, although "end-to-end" is correct as it indicates a
compound adjective - a phrase acting as a single adjective affecting the noun
("encryption") that follows it.

------
nofilter
While they are it, could they make the Skype application an actually reliable
one? I find WhatsApp video and call quality far superiour to that of Skype,
which has years on WhatsApp. Not only is the video and call quality subpar,
the app itself often behaves in odd ways. Personally, I've come to dislike
Skype greatly.

------
Zhenya
Great news. More funding for Open Whisper to provide us Signal.

~~~
mtgx
They could get 100x the amount they've gotten so far from these companies if
they had launched their own crypto-asset, which is probably by far the best
way for an open source project to get funding.

~~~
corford
Moxie Marlinspike is involved in:
[https://www.mobilecoin.com/](https://www.mobilecoin.com/)

------
simplify
How does Signal's chat security compare to Keybase.io's chat? Keybase has more
features, but if it's not as secure, then it doesn't matter.

~~~
pilif
Keybase doesn’t support forward secrecy. The signal protocol does, though I
can’t say whether that’s true for Skype's implementation of the protocol

~~~
oconnor663
Some docs here:
[https://keybase.io/docs/crypto/chat](https://keybase.io/docs/crypto/chat)

To add a little bit, avoiding forward secrecy was a design decision. We wanted
to support adding and removing devices from your account (including removing
all of your original devices, if you want), and we wanted new devices to be
able to read your message history. I think those two things put together are
in conflict with forward secrecy.

That said, we'd like to allow you to turn off history for some messages, and
it would be nice if you got forward secrecy for those messages when you did
that. We're currently in the middle of figuring out how that's going to work.
One of the open problems is this sort of situation: If I have 5 devices, and
one of them is a laptop that's been in the closet for 3 years and won't ever
rotate its keys again, how do we avoid making that laptop a giant hole in my
forward secrecy guarantees?

~~~
caf
It seems like a reasonable design decision to have a time horizon beyond which
a device which has been out of communication loses access to more recent
messages. That could be significantly less than 3 years - probably a week or
two is fine.

------
qwerty456127
Does this mean Skype will stop cooperating with governments demanding chat
history disclosure?

~~~
usuallymatt
They'll still cooperate but they'll have much less data to provide.

------
Aissen
I can't help but read this with a cynical voice in my head: Skype used to have
an incredibly bleeding edge P2P E2E encrypted protocol, and Microsoft threw it
all away. Some might say for good reasons (mobile use case, supernodes
straining routers, legal wiretap compliance issues); I'd respectfully disagree
and observe that there's just going full-circle.

~~~
pjc50
Yeah, Microsoft moving to a model where "lawful intercept" is no longer
possible would be hugely surprising.

~~~
danjoc
They can still lawful intercept. All they have to do is push a MITMed version
to suspected law breakers. It's going to be closed source just like WhatsApp,
so of course, it will be easy for LE to defeat while shedding crocodile tears
publicly about how it's uncrackable.

~~~
walterbell
How could Skype target binaries to individual users?

~~~
cjalmeida
They don't need it. They can simply turn a switch and disable E2E between
parties under investigation.

Remember this is closed source and you're using a central infrastructure.

------
ddorian43
My skype broke (empty everything) on ubuntu,android,web and only works on
windows old installation with upgrade.

~~~
lovemenot
Same here. Until now, I assumed I'd somehow screwed up my registration on
Android.

------
fwn
It is probably opt-in and a crippled version of the default chat interface.

This way the few users of the feature will be visible like a Christmas tree in
a dark forest and the general userbase will think it's their laziness not to
use encrypted Skype.

That's also how Facebook implemented it in messenger.

------
dmitrygr
Skype complies with at least court-ordered wiretap requests (they were forced
to when MS bought them). How exactly will that work without "e2e but with key
escrow"? And "e2e with key escrow" is basically the same as "plaintext"

------
peter_retief
I abandoned Skype after Microsoft bought them out, I don't miss them even a
little. If Microsoft could buy Linux they would probably break it as well,
thank goodness its not for sale

------
sarah180
Does this mean I'll need to give Skype a verified phone number and some
version of all my contacts for … reasons. Reasons that are, trust us, so
important that we can't let you opt out of them, but that have nothing to do
with us keeping your phone number.

I like everything else about Signal, but won't use it as long as they mandate
that you tie your account to a verified, non-throwaway phone number. That's
asking for more trust than I'm willing to give.

~~~
mynameisvlad
This is Signal the E2E protocol (also used by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and
Google Allo), not Signal the app. The number requirement is part of the app. I
assume your identifier in Skype will be your Skype name/MS Account.

------
fulafel
Does mean the consumer Skype or the corporate Skype?

~~~
freeone3000
Article refers to consumer Skype, not SkypeForBusiness.

------
anomie31
Will Chinese citizens be receiving this update?

------
Tacite
What’s the point ? There’s still backdoors in Skype anyway, lol.

~~~
theprotocol
Indeed. The latter end of end-to-end may not be the end intended by the user.

------
Markoff
I would much more prefer if they would fix such basic things as missing
front/rear camera switch in video call or inability to send more than one
photo at same time.

------
romanovcode
Would be cool if MS would just drop Skype and adopt Signal.

------
Exuma
This means we can still trust Signal right? That's the app I use because some
large security experts said it was one of the best.

~~~
jlund
Nothing about Signal itself is changing. This is Microsoft adopting the Signal
Protocol for a new feature in Skype.

------
usaphp
While on topic of Skype: My God the latest Skype design update is abysmal,
whoever come up with that horrible mess should be fired and never touch any
design or management role at all.

And it’s not only design but the ux is horrible too, when you switch between
conversation - it does not focus on the chat box field so you can start typing
right away, instead you have to click it first. This is a basic stuff for a
chatting app and whoever missed that is apparently clueless about ux

Edit: also if any of Skype iOS app developers is reading this - on iPhone X
when you accidentally click top left corner of the phone where the clock is -
for some inexplicable reason the whole conversation scrolls all the way to the
top, which is incredibly annoying!

~~~
lvillani
> on iPhone X when you accidentally click top left corner of the phone where
> the clock is - for some inexplicable reason the whole conversation scrolls
> all the way to the top, which is incredibly annoying!

That's by design and standard iOS behaviour (it has been there for years).
Tapping anywhere on the system toolbar (i.e. where the clock, wifi, signal
strength indicators are) brings the main scrollable view to its "topmost"
position.

~~~
kettlecorn
I just tried it on this webpage, and you’re correct!

I really dislike behavior like this that is useful to a few people but is far
more likely to be encountered accidentally and feel buggy.

~~~
josefresco
You're kidding right? It's been a feature of iOS for what feels like forever,
and it's literally the one thing I miss most when switching to Android. I have
witnessed first hand, very un-tech savvy iOS users using the feature, as well
as people confused (my daughters) why the same action on Android doesn't
product the same result.

I thought this was one of Apple's "protected" features that everyone
used/loved - guess not!

~~~
usaphp
I agree it’s useful on web pages but there has got to be an option to disable
that in app conversations.

------
0xADADA
Skype is part of X-KEYSCORE, so NOPE>

------
voryzen
Screw Skype. That is all

------
ryanpcmcquen
Ugh, people are still using Skype?

~~~
alkonaut
Still looking for something that is free, does (persistent) group chat, voice
calls, file sharing, and group voice calls. Bonus if it shares screen.

Have tried various alternatives but actually not yet found anything that works
as good as skype, despite having terrible UX. The sound quality is second to
none and file sharing etc usually "just works".

~~~
ancientworldnow
Discord does all of this, though it's not E2E encrypted, and does it all with
a fantastic UX.

~~~
alkonaut
For some reason having the (non business) Skype is not hard to sell in a big
"old school" enterprise, because it's microsoft.

I'd have a much harder time selling Discord because of how they market
themselves. They could make "discord for business" that is _literally the same
app_ and have great success.

Other than that my only complaint is that it's a bit electron-y.

~~~
Kuraj
> They could make "discord for business" that is literally the same app and
> have great success.

Discord is sometimes known as "slack for gamers" so you're effectively
describing Slack :)

~~~
alkonaut
Yes. But slack, like HipChat thinks I want to pay 500MB RAM and $7 per user
per month to chat and voice call.

Effectively all I want is a lean chat/voice app that’s also ideally free. This
is pretty easy - but when you throw in the other Skype features (group voice,
screen sharing, mobile apps) as requirements, it’s actually pretty hard to
match in the free tier.

Skype is $0 regardless of company size and the resource use is pretty
reasonable.

On that topic: Why aren’t more companies using discord instead of Slack?
Looking at feature matrices it seems discord does in the free version a lot of
what Slack does in paid (e.g group voice)?

~~~
tenryuu
One big reason not to is due to corporate policies, mostly could be summed
into legal matters, such as privacy, usage rights etc.

------
mtgx
This is still an _optional feature_ , so like 98%+ of the users will not use,
and the other 2% probably won't use it all the time either.

Right now only Signal and WhatsApp enable the end-to-end encryption by
default.

Microsoft should remember that they can't use the excuse that "they can't
provide law enforcement with the messages" unless the users were also using
the E2E mode/Private Conversations.

It would also help if Microsoft stopped supporting voice calls in its main
client, too, as that automatically qualifies it as a "telecom provider" in
many countries, which means it automatically falls under the same lawful
intercept laws that affect telecom providers.

Unless these changes are made, then this news hardly changes anything in
regards to Skype messages being intercepted.

------
beaconfield
yeah... um. Why would Signal (OpenWhisper) sully their name by coordinating
efforts with MS? MS doesn't have a great track record at being an advocate for
privacy or user security...

~~~
qznc
The mission of OpenWhisper is to bring e2e encryption to the masses, not to
make Signal the messenger the dominant IM tool. They succeed spectacularly by
making the popular IMs adopt Signal the protocol.

