<story><title>Telegram has launched a pretty intense campaign to malign Signal as insecure</title><url>https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789687898863792453</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treprinum</author><text>Why is home-rolled crypto inherently insecure?</text></item><item><author>imjonse</author><text>Telegram were claiming they were more secure even when they had their own home-rolled crypto. Security is not Telegram&amp;#x27;s strong point and it never was.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>GuB-42</author><text>To add to the idea that crypto is hard, it is not just hard in the same way that, say, making a physics engine is hard. It is hard because there is no telltale sign you did it wrong.&lt;p&gt;All crypto algorithms, even weak ones output what looks like random numbers that can be deciphered back into the original plaintext. Just by looking at it, there is no way to differentiate between secure and insecure crypto. Contrast to a physics engine, it is hard to get right, but at least, if you did it wrong, it tends to be obvious.&lt;p&gt;Also, like everything security-related, it is adverserial. You may have some of the smartest and most resourceful guys on the planet working to break your thing. It is worse than even critical systems. Aircraft engine control is critical, people may die if it goes wrong, so robustness and correctness are crucial, but at least, pilots won&amp;#x27;t go out of their way to break it.</text></comment>
<story><title>Telegram has launched a pretty intense campaign to malign Signal as insecure</title><url>https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789687898863792453</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>treprinum</author><text>Why is home-rolled crypto inherently insecure?</text></item><item><author>imjonse</author><text>Telegram were claiming they were more secure even when they had their own home-rolled crypto. Security is not Telegram&amp;#x27;s strong point and it never was.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>danpalmer</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s inherently risky – cryptography is &lt;i&gt;hard&lt;/i&gt; and building secure software is hard, so starting it from scratch rather than re-using well-vetted code increases the risk unnecessarily.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s not inherently broken, but it&amp;#x27;s sufficiently risky that it may be fair to assume it is broken. History has proven that software that&amp;#x27;s not known to be secure is typically insecure when it gets to the really hard crypto implementation. I think it&amp;#x27;s fair therefore to approximate it as &amp;quot;inherently insecure&amp;quot;.</text></comment>