Dutch & French police take down Matrix encrypted chat app; 2.3 million messages captured

Wish OP had written that in post… I nearly got a heart attack and was wondering how TF they done that 🤣

I would love to call the headline clickbaity bs, but it's technically accurate and somehow this makes it worse and better at the same time.

But what is the Matrix?

Thank you

It's it different from the matrix Neo lives in too?

I just listened to the Search Engine podcast episode covering ANOM last night! Completely wild the reach of this program entailed.

Link to the episode for those that are interested.

Did the authorities post "FIRSSTTT"?

lol

Well goodness. I read the article, fortunately, but it's good to see other people pointing out here.

My initial thought was that this was the matrix we obviously care about. I didn't look at the details to see if these people are truly nefarious and do belong in jail, which I'm okay with, but it was definitely troubling to imagine that something I thought secure wasn't secure. 😬

I like the full quote better:

Dutch police said the Matrix app was targeted along with similar encrypted services known by the names Mactrix, Totalsex, X-quantum and Q-Safe. The investigation did not spotlight the similarly-named Matrix open source communication protocol.

Absolute dupe-magnets.

What is the Matrix?

As with all criminals, it's only the dumb ones that get caught.

The allure of the potential for "security through obscurity" is great if you don't know better.

Probably an implementation issue. Make a small error there, like storing parts of a key in memory or something like that and you've compromised security.

Encryption is easy, key exchange is not

RSA doesn't scale, so if the message is large then RSA becomes unwieldy. So most encryption methods that make use of RSA actually encrypt the data with a symmetric algorithm, and then just encrypt the key for the symmetric data using the RSA key.

But there is still way way way too many ways to implement crypto wrong, which can completely compromise the security of it.

Perhaps she was just wrong

When was this? In years past there were weird restrictions about exporting strong encryption algorithms from the US. So much so that Java didn't have unlimited strength algorithms bundled by default. Depending on the time she said this/she was talking about then it could've just been a comment on the weak algorithms being, well, weak.