Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement
Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement
New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.
Why do we keep caring about signal when there's Matrix?
Because my grandpa can work with signal which is still encrypted communication. Thus its a low threshhold to adoption and significant increase in cyber hygiene. Even for his type of audience.
Because Signal works and Matrix doesn't.
Because Matrix barely works half the time and has some significant security/privacy flaws still. One of which is: if there's a bug that makes it possible for someone to snoop your metadata and the fix requires a server update... You're SOL if the people you're talking to don't get the update.
Having in mind we are not even close to breaking classical cryptography with quantum computing I doubt this was their best investment of time
the best time was yesterday. the next best time is today. securing systems after they're broken, when data could actively be collected prior to the breakthrough, is not the way to approach security.
There are nation states just straight up intercepting and storing signal data on their networks in hopes that it can be decrypted in the future. 20 year old messages will still be useful.
Also known as Harvest now, decrypt later. And it's a serious security threats that Signal must consider and handle
Their core feature is secure messaging, so I'd say this result highlights their dedication to the secure aspect of it. So an excellent feature in terms of branding, and probably has more benefits in other places e.g. attracting talent, as developers now can see Signal offers great opportunities to work on complex problems.
So I'm curious; what do you think would be better investment of their time?
It's future-proofing. It means my messages are not only safe today but, even if they are intercepted or leaked somehow, will also be safe in the future.
I doubt that the first ones to break it will be eager to communicate their findings to the public.
This tech is far to valuable for military/spionage goals. For all we know it already exists.
There's hardly ever glory in prevention...
We're as close to quantum computers as we are to ChatGPT becoming sentient.
Lol, it shows the hype quantum computing has sold and how detached the public thought is about it from reality.
I'm friends with two quantum computing researchers and they are pretty sure quantum computing will never be a practical application because of how the noise and errors scale with the system size.
The quantum computing hype is really annoying but we don't know the future. One day there might be a breakthrough in noise reduction. I'd rather signal have post-quantum cryptography and not need it than get blindsided if there is suddenly a qc that can break rsa with shor. Not to mention intelligence agencies doing store now/decrypt later stuff.
Great. Now we just have to get Signal off AWS and we be good.
Signal puts a lot of effort into their threat model that assumes a hostile host (i.e. AWS). That's the whole point of end to end encryption, even if the host is compromised the attackers do not get any information. They even go as far as padding out the lengths of encrypted messages so everyone looks like they are sending identical blocks of data
I'm assuming that they were more referring to the outage that occurred today that pulled a ton of the internet services, including signal offline temporarily.
You can have all the encryption in the world, but if the centralized data point that allows you to access the service is down, then you're fucked.
Nitpicking here but assuming from the previous words in your comment that you mean blocks of data of identical length.
Although it should be as if we are sending multiples of identical size, I suppose.
Anyway, sorry for nitpicking.
Padding isn't anything special. Most practical uses of block ciphers require it.
or federated server
Would be very cool to be able to host a Signal homeserver.
I guess the research doesn't have to be limited to signal. If other apps can benefit from it the more resilient "private communications over the internet" get.
So that's why Signal didn't send my messages very quickly today then, maybe.
It's not completely out yet. That was likely AWS being down.
Also, the new quantum protected message encryption headers are about 2kb. If that's causing issues with your internet, you may want to consider looking at new internet.
Just use Matrix...
I did, it's a buggy undercooked mess that doesn't work half the time. The app that's officially supported is missing half the features. Trying to get people to switch to it is like pulling teeth as the onboarding process in overly complicated for the average user.
Meanwhile Signal works right out of the box with very little fuss.
I could. Presumably so could the others commenting on this post. But then what are we to do about the privacy or tech illiterate people we've carried to Signal over the years?
It's easy to winge about just doing what you perceive as the optimal solution. It's more difficult when you need to navigate the path to get there from where we are now.
No