Confirming what has perhaps always been known but rarely stated publicly, the founder of popular encrypted-messaging app Telegram Messenger LLP said that he was indeed offered bribes by U.S. government officials to install a backdoor into the app to give them access to messages.

The accusation comes from Pavel Durov, who took to Twitter to make the allegations. “During our team’s 1-week visit to the US last year we had two attempts to bribe our devs by US agencies + pressure on me from the FBI,” Durov in a tweet, before adding “It would be naive to think you can run an independent/secure cryptoapp based in the U.S.”

Durov also threw mud at Signal, a rival encrypted messaging app that is endorsed by Edward Snowden and others, claiming that the encryption used by Signal will eventually be compromised. “The encryption of Signal (=WhatsApp, FB) was funded by the U.S. Government. I predict a backdoor will be found there within 5 years from now,” Durov wrote in another tweet.

The protocol, first developed commercially by Open Whisper Systems and implemented in Signal, is the same encryption protocol used by the Facebook Inc.-owned WhatsApp and is also offered in Facebook Messenger through its secret-conversations option.

Some have not taken the accusations leveled at Signal well. Martijn Grooten, editor of Virus Bulletin, wrote on Twitter, “Not sure what’s worse here: the backdoor nonsense, or the fact that it’s like the Pepsi CEO claiming that Coca Cola is deliberately poisoned.”

That Telegram has been pressured to offer a backdoor to its encrypted messaging platform is not at all surprising. The app is regularly mentioned by the media as being favored by terrorists who wish to make sure that they can communicate without their messages being intercepted. In addition to promising to crack down on Facebook and Google Inc., British Prime Minister Theresa May has previously proposed laws that would force Telegram, along with WhatsApp, to decrypt communications.

Photo: janitors/Flickr