Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal, visited Kyiv. He spoke at the Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum 2026. The conversation was moderated by Osana Ferchuk, Deputy Minister of Defense for Digitalization.
Moxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal, visited Kyiv. He spoke at the Kyiv International Cyber Resilience Forum 2026. The conversation was moderated by Osana Ferchuk, Deputy Minister of Defense for Digitalization.
The most interesting part of the conversation was a short dialogue about Telegram.
Moxie explained with a simple example what cybersecurity experts have been saying for a long time: Telegram is not a secure messenger. It is a convenient product with the illusion of privacy.
«Imagine: you dropped your phone in the water. You bought a new one, entered the number, received an SMS code — and all your correspondence is in front of you again. Convenient? Yes. But this is exactly what proves that there is no encryption. In a truly secure environment, this is impossible: the secret key is stored only on your device, and together with the submerged phone, it disappears forever.
This means one thing: all your messages are in the open on Telegram servers. And the company’s team has full access to them — without any technical restrictions, the Signal founder emphasized.
This is not a theory. This was confirmed by a real case: in 2024, Pavel Durov (founder of Telegram) was arrested in France for refusing to provide data in a child pornography case. And he had access to the data, as did the entire Telegram team, but they decided not to react at first.
«He was arrested and essentially forced to respond. If France did this, it’s unbelievable to me that Russia didn’t have a much less polite version of the conversation much earlier,» the founder of Signal said.
And here begins the most important thing for Ukraine. As Moxie noted during his speech, the Telegram development team is mostly Russian citizens. Their families live there. And they are «still alive and walking around freely,» and this, in his opinion, is suspicious in itself.
After the speech, a dev.ua journalist asked Moxie Marlinspike several additional questions on this topic.
— You said that Telegram representatives are walking around alive somewhere. Is this in Ukraine?
— No, they’re in Russia. They’re just traveling around the world.
— But how do you think Ukraine interacts with Telegram? How does it manage to maintain contact between the Ukrainian government and this structure?
— I don’t know. («The Ukrainian government banned Telegram,» adds Oksana Ferchuk, who was standing nearby).
— Do you personally have any contacts with the Ukrainian government — for example, to protect the army?
— No. Signal is simply available to everyone, and we do not have access to any user data.
— Are you developing something for the army? A special messenger?
— No.
— And your AI product — when will it be ready?
— It’s ready. It’s like an encrypted AI chat — like ChatGPT, but only you have access to your conversations.
— Is this an alternative to ChatGPT? Does it require a large investment?
— No, it uses open source models, so you don’t need to train your own.
— What is it called and where can I find it?
— Confer. You can find it at confer.to .
— If Telegram doesn’t encrypt data, can soldiers' messages be seen in Russia?
— Yes.
— What advice would you give to Ukrainians who still use Telegram?
«Just know that this is not private.»
— And if a business uses Telegram, is it dangerous?
— It depends on how much they value the privacy of their data.
— What if the government?
— I think that’s not good.
«So you wouldn’t do that, would you?»
— I am an engineer and I don’t use Telegram.
— During your speech, you said that Signal, and also WhatsApp, are reliable messengers that maintain a privacy infrastructure.
— Yes.
— But not Facebook Messenger?
— Not by default.
— So your case, if the phone falls into a river and all encrypted data disappears with it, applies to WhatsApp as well?
— Yes.
The moderator of the speech, Oksana Ferchuk, emphasized at the end of the speech that people all over the world still use Telegram. She asked Moxie what is unique about it? Why, in his opinion, do people not change their behavior, even knowing that their data is not protected?
«I don’t know. Telegram is a good app. And I’m sure people find it very useful. Maybe people don’t want to not be able to find the same functionality. Sometimes it’s hard to switch to other networks when they come out. But I don’t know. You’d have to ask them why they haven’t switched. But it seems like it could be risky.»
