> you can install a reproducible build of Telegram and be sure it's end-to-end encrypting things.
This is incorrect. The construction for group chats in Telegram is not e2e at all. The construction for dm’s is considered dubious by many cryptographers.
It does not matter if you can reproduce a non-e2e encrypted message scheme, you must still trust the servers which you have no visibility on.
Trustworthy e2e is table stakes for this for that reason. Reproducible builds aren’t because we can evaluate a bunch of different builds collected in the wild and detect differences in implementation. This is the same thing we’d do if reproducible builds were in effect.
There are lots of reasons splitting jurisdictions makes sense but you wrote a whole bunch of words that fall back to “hope Telegram doesn’t change their protections in the face of governmental violence”.
The reproducible build of Telegram lets you evaluate the code doing end-to-end encryption. Once you satisfy yourself it's doing this kind of encryption without implementation-level backdoors, then you don't need to worry about servers reading it (except for #5 above).
I didn't claim it encrypted "group chats". I said "things". If you want me to be specific, the "things" are individual 1-1 end-to-end encrypted chats.
Reproducible builds are not required to evaluate the encryption algorithm used in Telegram.
Software auditors use deployed binaries as a matter of course.
They’d do so even if reproducible builds are on offer because the code and the binary aren’t promised to be the same even with reproducible builds and validating that they are can be more problematic than the normal case of auditing binaries.
It's interesting how all these years later and cryptographers can still only be dubious; nobody has actually cracked the implementation (or if they have, they haven't publicized it for whatever reason).
This is incorrect. The construction for group chats in Telegram is not e2e at all. The construction for dm’s is considered dubious by many cryptographers.
It does not matter if you can reproduce a non-e2e encrypted message scheme, you must still trust the servers which you have no visibility on.
Trustworthy e2e is table stakes for this for that reason. Reproducible builds aren’t because we can evaluate a bunch of different builds collected in the wild and detect differences in implementation. This is the same thing we’d do if reproducible builds were in effect.
There are lots of reasons splitting jurisdictions makes sense but you wrote a whole bunch of words that fall back to “hope Telegram doesn’t change their protections in the face of governmental violence”.