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Why doesn't Signal forbid third party clients or at least offer a client certification program to ensure security? (feddit.org)

submitted 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) by Dot@feddit.org to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Signal forks can have unexpected behaviours like retaining deleted messages and also they don't get updated at the same rate that Signal get updated.
Every couple of years I hear a story about hackers disturbing signal with backdoors, which would be impossible or very hard to be done If they blocked third party clients. (Ex: 1)
The amount of people who use third party Signal clients are very few anyway.

I saw what WhatsApp did to forbid modification of it's app which works in stopping a lot of distributions, why doesn't Signal do the same?

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[–] AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space 26 points 14 hours ago (6 children)

IIRC, they do forbid third-party clients from their network. You can build it from source, but you won’t be able to connect to production Signal servers.

Third-party clients would not necessarily be a bad thing. Signal has limited resources, and as such has to cut corners. I for one would love a native desktop client that’s not Electron bloatware.

[–] Dot@feddit.org 2 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago) (5 children)

There are already 2 third party forks I know of, Molly and Signal-JW.

They both use and access the main production Signal servers.

As I said, a compromise here would be to have a client security certification program, where no other clients outside it would be able to use Signal.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

As I said, a compromise here would be to have a client security certification program, where no other clients outside it would be able to use Signal.

You mean running a trojan "as a mean of security", similar to anticheats? Are you sure this is a good idea?

Or if by "program" you mean having some allowed clients as opposite to only the official one allowed, it's a social thing, not a technical one. So it still won't prevent anyone from connecting with another client.

[–] Dot@feddit.org 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

I mean having a list of allowed clients.

As I said in my post, WhatsApp already enforce forbidding third party client and it seems to work well.

I don't see why wouldn't Signal improve the security of their users by implementing this, while upsetting the very few users who use third party clients.

[–] rottingleaf@lemmy.world 1 points 12 hours ago

How do you imagine this working?

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