Telegram App
What is Telegram?
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| Telegram App |
Telegram
is an online messaging app that works just like popular messaging apps WhatsApp
and Facebook Messenger. This means that you can use it to send messages to your
friends when connected to Wi-Fi or your mobile data. Telegram is cloud-based
and claims that it prioritizes security and speed, making it a good alternative
to other popular messaging apps. The service launched in 2013, and since then
it has reached 200 million active monthly users.
Distinctive features
Founded
by Russian Pavel Durov, who’s also behind Russia’s largest social network
VKontakte (VK), Telegram claims to combine the speed of WhatApp with Snapchat’s
ephemerality. Like WhatsApp, Telegram has also the ability to show a friend’s
status online and attach and share photos, videos, location, contacts and
documents.
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| welcome to telegram |
Telegram’s
distinctive feature is security. It claims that all its activities including
chats, groups and media shared between participants, is encrypted. This means
that they won’t be visible without being deciphered first. The app also lets
you set self-destruct timers on messages and media that you share which can
range from two seconds to one week through its built-in feature ‘Secret Chat’.
It also offers end-to-end encryption, leaving no trace on Telegram’s servers.
There’s
also the ability to check the security of your ‘Secret Chats’ using an image
that serves as an encryption key. By comparing your encryption key to a
friend’s, you can effectively verify that your conversation is secure and less
vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
How to use it
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| how to use telegram |
Telegram
can be used and installed just like other messaging apps. You can download it
from Apple’s App Store or from Google’s Play Store – look for the paper
airplane logo. After flipping through the welcome screen, you’ll be prompted to
enter your phone number and then add your name and a picture. The next step is
to find friends and start a chat.
The app can be
used on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers. Telegram is
available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows NT, macOS and Linux.
Is Telegram secure?
Concerns about the security of Telegram were raised not long after its
release.
By default, the app doesn’t encrypt end-to-end communications (e.g.,
between your phone and the person’s phone you are chatting with). You have to
manually enable this feature, called Secret Chat. Otherwise, your chats will be
saved on Telegram’s servers, which are in various locations throughout the
world. The communication between the client (i.e., your phone or other device)
and Telegram’s servers is encrypted, and your chat data stored on these servers
is encrypted, supposedly.
The Telegram developers emphasize this is so that you can recover your
chats should you lose your phone or other device. But why is letting your chat
data be stored on their servers not offered as an opt-in, and encrypted
end-to-end chatting not set as the default? Keeping your chat data stored on
these servers has to be an expense for their non-profit company.
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| Encryption key |
Experts in the encryption field have also questioned why Telegram uses a homegrown encryption protocol, called MTProto, when there are other freely
available encryption protocols that have proven to be effective … and that have
been vetted by independent experts.
(The Telegram website has available for download the purported source
code for the desktop and mobile app versions of Telegram. The Telegram
developers say this code allows researchers to evaluate the messenger’s
encryption protocol.)
Why (and
how) Russia blocked Telegram
The Russian government security agency, the Federal
Security Service, ordered
Telegram’s developers to turn over the encryption keysfor Telegram’s MTProto protocol to them by April 4,
2018. Pavel Durov refused to comply. According to him, there were about 15
million users of Telegram in Russia.
The Russian Supreme Court then ordered Telegram banned in the country.
Roskomnadzor (Russia’s equivalent of the U.S. FCC) ordered
Russian ISPs to block the app. As of May 8, 2018, this has resulted in these
ISPs blocking more than 10 million IP
addresses. This blocklist was so
high to prevent a workaround — domain fronting — from working through Telegram.
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| Telegram in Russia |
Generally speaking, domain fronting enables an app to connect to a
blocked domain by appearing to connect to another domain that hasn’t been
blocked. It is an unintended feature that has been exploited as a security flaw.
Amazon and
Google disabled domain fronting from their services in April 2018 after the Russian ban on Telegram. It was reported they did
so partly due
to request by the Russian government.
Telegram
vs. WhatsApp: Secure messaging alternatives
Secure
messengers other than Telegram include Signal, WhatsApp and Wire. The most popular is WhatsApp, with 1.5
billion users.
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| Telegram vs Whatsapp |
In contrast
to Telegram, all of these have encrypted end-to-end communications turned on by
default. So your chat data is stored, and encrypted, only on your phone or
other device that you’re chatting from, and not on a server. They use the
Signal Protocol (developed by the Signal messenger developers), which has been approved
by encryption experts and is available for the public to evaluate and freely use.
Thank you,
Lucifer.
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