this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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Any time you hear about anyone high profile using a chat app - what are they using?
They're using Signal.
There's a reason why they're using Signal; as far as security it's the best one out there. Sure, it's tied to a phone number, but a phone number isn't an identity.
Phone numbers are heavily tied to a person.
What signal had going for it is encryption, but that major flaw of tied to phone number makes me doubt everything else they say.
The phone number link means forward security isn't possible. If ever the encryption is hacked, all your messages could be forfeit by anyone who's simply kept the encrypted data.
Can you elaborate on that? Obviously the phone number has privacy implications, but I don't think it can be used to decrypt messages. In the signal protocol, encryption keys are exchanged using ECDH (so wiretapping doesn't work) and periodically rotated (so even knowing the encryption keys at a certain point doesn't let you decrypt messages after that).
A phone number can be traced back to a person. If there is ever a hack or backdoor it can be traced. There are plenty of alternatives that are open source and don't require any kind of identifier.