These backups undo much of the strong security offered by end-to-end encryption - since they make it much easier for hackers and governments to obtain your plaintext content. If your goal is to build a really secure messaging product, it’s very impressive.Įncrypted messengers like WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage routinely back up your text message content and contact lists to remote cloud servers. As a strategy for obtaining large-scale adoption, this is a lousy one. Wherever usability concerns have come into conflict with security, Signal has historically chosen the more cautious and safer approach - as compared to more commercial alternatives like WhatsApp. Second, the Signal app itself is popular with security-minded people, mostly because the app, with its relatively smaller and more technical user base, has tended towards a no-compromises approach to the security experience. First: the Signal app has served as a sort of technology demo for the Signal Protocol, which is the fundamental underlying cryptography that powers popular apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, and all their billions of users. There are basically two reasons for this. Signal has received a lot of love from the security community. What’s Signal, and why does it matter?įor those who aren’t familiar with it, Signal is an open-source app developed by Moxie Marlinkspike’s Signal Technology Foundation. In this post, I want to delve a little bit deeper into why these decisions have made me so concerned, and what Signal is doing to try to mitigate those concerns. For a shorter summary of the issue, see this article. The new Signal approach has created some trauma with security people, due to the fact that it was recently enabled without a particularly clear explanation. The SVR feature allows Signal to upload your contacts into Signal’s servers without - ostensibly - even Signal itself being able to access it. This is a contact list backup feature based on a new system called Secure Value Recovery, or SVR. One of those features has recently been raising a bit of controversy with users. Over the past several months, Signal has been rolling out a raft of new features to make its app more usable.
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