Senator Calls for Investigation into "Poor Signal Clone" Used by US Officials

By Netvora Tech News

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US Senator Ron Wyden has written to the Department of Justice requesting an investigation into TeleMessage Signal Archiver, a modified version of the popular encrypted messaging app Signal used by some US government officials. The request comes after it was discovered that attackers had successfully stolen data from TeleMessage. TeleMessage Signal Archiver is designed to look and function like Signal, allowing users to communicate with other Signal users. The app's purpose is to archive messages sent by users. TeleMessage claims that messages are not decrypted until they are sent to the customer's archiving server. However, a security researcher found that the TeleMessage app sends a copy of every incoming and outgoing message to the company's server. Wyden criticized the government agencies that use TeleMessage Archiver, saying they have chosen the "worst possible option." They have given their users an app that looks like Signal, the most trusted secure communication app, but instead, they have received a "bad Signal clone" that poses significant security and counter-intelligence risks. The problem, according to Wyden, is that government agencies want to store messages sent by their employees via an app that was not designed for this purpose. "Signal is designed for ordinary users who don't need or want to store their messages forever, let alone on a central server," Wyden said. "Adding archiving capabilities to Signal without undermining its security was always a difficult task. TeleMessage seems to have designed it in a way that introduces new vulnerabilities." Wyden is unsure whether the design is the result of incompetence by a foreign company or a deliberate backdoor to help foreign intelligence services collect information on American government officials. He notes that the dangerous design should have been discovered before the app was installed on the national security advisor's phone. The senator is now asking the Department of Justice to investigate whether TeleMessage misled the US government about the security of the product. The investigation should also look into whether foreign TeleMessage employees had access to messages from American officials, whether these messages were shared with the Israeli government, and whether the Israeli government played a role in designing the app.