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Former Whatsapp Users Bring Telegram to its Knees

posted by Dopefish on Sunday February 23 2014, @02:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the there-is-no-viable-alternative dept.
girlwhowaspluggedout writes:

"A mere three days after Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook's acquisition of Whatsapp, the popular smartphone messaging app suffered a major service outage that lasted three and a half hours. Left to their own devices, Whatsapp users worldwide went rushing to its rival apps, including secure chat provider Telegram. The surge in new users quickly turned into a tidal wave that brought Telegram's service to its knees:

The SMS gateways we use to send registration codes are overloaded and slow 100 SMS per second is too much. Trying to find a solution.

In its official twitter, Telegram announced that more than 1.8 million new users had joined on Saturday, Feb 22. Four hours later, it reported an additional 800 thousand.

Telegram's messaging service, which uses 256-bit symmetric AES encryption, RSA 2048 encryption and Diffie-Hellman secure key exchange, began enjoying a spike in popularity after Whatsapp's acquisition. Although it has released the source code for its java libraries and all its official clients, its server software is still closed source."

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Sunday February 23 2014, @04:17PM

    by Nerdfest (80) on Sunday February 23 2014, @04:17PM (#5298)

    This assumes that the initial key exchange was secure, and I'm guessing that it's done thought Telegram. If Telegram does the initial key exchange, can't it still happen?

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2014, @06:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 23 2014, @06:35PM (#5344)

    According to your friendly neighbor Wikipedia, the Diffie-Hellman key exchange method [wikipedia.org] "allows two parties that have no prior knowledge of each other to jointly establish a shared secret key over an insecure communications channel".

    • (Score: 1) by TheLink on Monday February 24 2014, @02:17AM

      by TheLink (332) on Monday February 24 2014, @02:17AM (#5599)
      Doesn't prevent MITM. You may think you are talking to B but actually you are talking to C and C is talking to B. So you to C is "secure" and C to B is secure. But you to B is not.

      But if you can trust your software clients the picture stuff does give some sort of plausibility if you verify them over a different channel (or you directly verify the keys over that channel).

    • (Score: 1) by chromas on Monday February 24 2014, @02:36AM

      by chromas (34) on Monday February 24 2014, @02:36AM (#5608)

      There, fixed Slash's misteak (blame β)