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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 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/technology

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 month ago (1 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.

[+] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] Static_Rocket 11 points 1 month ago

I could appreciate a client certification that is optional, like a list of approved clients on their website or something along those lines.

It should not be enforced by killing the client. I like security, but I enjoy software freedom more.

[–] just_another_person 2 points 1 month ago

It takes resources to run and maintain such things. Probably not something they feel they can or want to take on.

[–] rottingleaf 0 points 1 month ago (1 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.