That's maybe true for privacy enthusiasts. You severely underestimate the need for these cutesy features when targeting mass market though. I claim stickers are much more important for that than data exporting.
Personally, I don't care much for features supporting cyber-grooming. What's the point of using cutesy features to attract users who don't care about security, just so someone else can _securely_ cyber-groom them?
Stickers aren't targeting young audiences in any sense. It's very weird to draw such conclusions just if you're not using them yourself (if that's the case).
So user-controlled portability doesn't seems fatal to the "point" of having a secure chat app, there.
My workaround, last time I upgraded my iOS device, was to screenshot all the old conversations I wanted to retain. Pictures come over just fine! Did Signal forcing me to do that make me more secure?
I think they just hate iCloud. (Perhaps while they trust Intel, they distrust Apple? It'd be great to know why.)
Well, I don't trust iCloud with my device backups, either. There are other things, in other apps on my phone, more sensitive than my Signal logs.
But it seems Signal is holding my chat histories hostage because they don't trust me. And it seems their ultimate plan for this will require me to use some Signal-run, Intel-SGX-mediated 'trustable cloud' for my contacts & messages. No, thanks!
Sorry but I don't understand this sentence. Why?
Like, I get that it's challenging from a technical standpoint, but I absolutely don't see why it would be pointless?
Riot/Matrix does it: it's far from mature/polished—plenty of room for improvement—but it uses double-ratchet, and it functions.
Secure messages shouldn’t persist and if they do they aren’t secure. Being able to export, upload, and restore an entire conversation history is the opposite of secure.
There is no point in using a secure messaging system if your entire conversation history can be downloaded the minute a single person in your group loses physical security on their device. Just use FB Messenger.
This is a nice, but ultimately utopic, non-sensical, impossible security requirement. I take your point that anything persistent is insecure, but anything received is potentially persistent.
There's no such thing as perfect security, there are only levels. Even a system with some hypothetical form of perfect plausible deniability designed into the receiving end could be compromised via transit metadata.
Saying persistence makes secure messaging pointless is pure hyperbole. Encryption protects against a broad range of threat vectors, some simple, others extremely challenging. There's value in every measure.
This is not likely to be the case.
Sure, but that could be up to every sender to decide whether they want their messages to be view once/view for 24hrs/store forever.
It should be noted that most of these were released at breakneck speed in the past couple of months. It feels like they spent most of the past two years hiring and training new people, probably stabilising the code bases a bit, and that that's now starting to pay off.
E.g. for online backups, SGX will only handle rate limiting. If you're using sufficiently secure password (+80 bits), Argon2 will provide robust enough security for your login and not even a backdoor in SGX matters.
> Session is an open-source, public-key-based secure messaging application which uses a set of decentralized storage servers and an onion routing protocol to send end-to-end encrypted messages with minimal exposure of user metadata. It does this while also providing common features of mainstream messaging applications
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22306140
whitepaper: https://getsession.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Session-Wh...
Meanwhile there are lots of other promising Matrix clients emerging which are aiming for person-to-person comms - e.g. http://dittochat.org, https://pattle.im, https://fluffy.chat etc.
https://www.signal.org/blog/secure-value-recovery/
... they also cite this as a bottleneck for adding non-phone identifiers. It seems like they are putting the infrastructure in place to fix a lot of the remaining usability issues that people have with them.
Why do they need me to trust Intel, or novel crypto/software that might be deployed in... when exactly? Why can't they let me just trust the same secure backups that all my other sensitive data/communications are in?
I really don't know why they're focusing on things like this. It does nothing to increase evidence-based trust, so it's no better than saying "we added a rate limiter, and delete keys after X attempts" (which I'd be totally fine with, and they could probably put in place in practically no time). Either way you're still relying on them doing what they said they're doing.
However, these "enrichment features" from Signal over the last 2 years are less than what competitors like Telegram put out in 2 months.
Really basic things remain undone. Like being able to carry your contacts/message-history forward across planned device-upgrades on iOS – https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/issues/2542 – 4.5 years after it was "on the roadmap".
Many of Signal's novel cryptographic innovations, while cool, depend on trusting Intel SGX: both as a technology & in Intel's stewardship of the master keys/attestation-chains. Many cryptographers don't believe SGX will be technologically reliable anytime soon, and much of the world will probably see US-based Intel Corp similar to how the US sees China-based Huawei.