Russian telecom watchdog begins blocking Telegram

Russia’s telecom and media watchdog, the Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media, has received the ruling by Moscow’s Tagansky District Court on restricting access to Telegram’s products in Russia, TASS reports.

The watchdog’s press service reported on Monday that the operators had been sent information on curbing access to Telegram’s resources.

On April 13, Moscow’s Tagansky District Court upheld the telecom watchdog’s motion to block access to the Telegram messenger in Russia for its failure to provide the keys to decrypt user messages to the Russian Federal Security Service, the FSB.

Telegram said this demand was impossible to comply with technically, since the keys are stored on user devices.

Telegram is a cloud-based instant messaging service developed by Telegram Messenger LLP, a privately held company registered in London, United Kingdom, founded by the Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov.

Telegram’s client-side code is open-source software but the source code for recent versions is not always immediately published, whereas its server-side code is closed-source and proprietary. The service also provides APIs to independent developers.

Telegram’s security model has received notable criticism by cryptography experts. They have argued that it is undermined by its use of a custom-designed encryption protocol that has not been proven reliable and secure, by storing all messages on its servers by default and by not enabling end-to-end encryption for messages by default. Pavel Durov has argued that this is because it helps to avoid third-party unsecure backups, and to allow users to access messages and files from any device. Messages in Telegram are server-client encrypted by default, and the service provides end-to-end encryption for voice calls and optional end-to-end encrypted “secret” chats.