> I'm probably just inviting myself to get trolled by replying to this

I'm sorry that you get that impression, but I do appreciate your input.

> Cryptographer Matthew Green on Signal's crypto and code quality (it was called RedPhone/TextSecure at the time of this writing)

That's the application that they sold to Twitter, not the one being talked about here. I do not know how different the code bases are.

It is also around that time that the app had a gaping, amateurish hole in that it was simply leaking everything via logcat. And what does the guy do? Instead of addressing the issue like a professional, he goes on a complete tangent rubbishing F-Droid (https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Android/issues/53) and then making rather poor excuses as to why you should get your application from the Google store and not from anywhere else.

Excuses which by the way, have been evolving over time. I think he eventually admitted that he wants to keep track of how many users are using it (handy to show to your potential buyers).

He also has a history of lying, such as when he used fake WHOIS details to run his "Google anonymiser" thing. And of course, when he was shut down by the registrar, as you do when someone has given you false details, what did he do? He went to the press to whine about the registrar! After he entered a contract in bad faith, something which happens to be a prosecutable offence. That's the sort of person we are talking about here. I hope you will understand if his word does not exactly fill me with confidence.

> https://www.eff.org/node/82654.

That page starts with: "This is version 1.0 of our scorecard; it is out of date, and is preserved here for purely historical reasons."

And continues with: "the results in the scorecard below should not be read as endorsements of individual tools or guarantees of their security"

> Signal has been analyzed, with favorable results, by academic researchers at least twice:

Yes, I am aware of those. And that is not what validation and verification is which, as I said, in the absence of publicly available design documents, is impossible to do independently. The guy is trying to make it look like he's selling a "secure" communication platform, but if you presented that to a defence contractor (which I have some experience with) you would be laughed out of the building. Proper security is not done like this at all. For a start, you actually define your goals, i.e., what you intend to secure, against what threats, etc., etc. If you can show me a paper with that information I would be grateful.

Notably, you may have noticed that those papers, like Green's, are a protocol analysis, not an analysis of the entire solution. In that respect, you're back to the previous situation: the protocol might be ultra-secure, but if you're still leaking your plaintext on a different channel...

> Moxie Marlinspike and [...] probably wouldn't call themselves "cryptographers,"

At the risk of sounding elitist, what is his academic background? (I elided the other person because I do not know who he is).

> but almost anybody in the field would agree that they are experts on applied cryptography.

What do you base that conjecture on?