Sweet Lies

Sweet Lies is a small but utterly vital massaging of the Signal secure communications software suite. Signal is similar in function to WhatsApp and Telegram end-to-end communication systems, but unlike them is completely open source.

(Why the name "Sweet Lies"? Several other names proved unusable, and the Fleetwood Mac song is about keeping secrets safe!)

From some points of view Signal is one of the most critical codebases in use, because it is the only personal messaging codebase which is all of:

• Validated by independent, academic, cybersecurity peer review
• Open Source
• Widely used, ported, accessible and accepted
• Mainstream - even the EU parliament insists on its use for internal communications
• Seemingly, so far, successfully resisting efforts of many authorities to break its security

Signal is the best existing solution for private communication we have. It also has some critically urgent problems that are thankfully also quite small in scope.

It would take years to build an end-to-end messaging system to replace Signal, because trustable systems are not quick systems. Whatever better solution we may have in 5-10 years, we need a better Signal right here right now.

The problems are:

• Signal is not reproducible, server or client. Reproducibility is a first basic requirement for security and therefore trust. This is a not a deliberate ploy on the part of the Signal team.
• Signal founders no longer enable federation of user data, meaning interoperabiity is not testable and that the Signal servers are a single point of failure.
• Nobody can deploy a Signal server themselves (calling it something other than "Signal", of course)
• Signal is end-to-end and does not store user data except to forward when necessary. Nevertheless, inspection of the Signal server code shows that it uses six US-based closed source cloud services. Even though the data is safe, and even though many organisations have been frustrated that Signal cannot provide data, this is a significant opportunity for sidechannel attacks and traffic analysis.
• Signal is not legal or suitable for use in Europe, because of the US cloud dependencies and because of the lack of reproducibility. Something as sensitive as this (in the EU parliament, no less!) needs to fully comply with EU privacy regulations, for the benefit of us all.

Sweet Lies relies on the production Not Forking tool developed for LumoSQL.

The Sweet Lies scope is to create a reproducible build of Signal client and server code, and then uses this to set up a Signal network that has federation enabled for connecting to other, independent Signal server instances. The outcomes will be a recipe for creating a Signal-identical network, and a working proof that this recipe works for some hundreds of users.

It seems very likely that when we can turn on a clone Signal network, that organisations of all kinds would very much like to have that same system themselves so they can be assured they have their own private Signal. This is a commercial opportunity.