Anonymous messaging is an entire category by itself. It is a much more difficult problem. Fortunately, most people don't need anonymity, most of the time. I really don't care who knows that I am communicating with friends, family or the people related to my business. If anything, I care less that someone might find out I use Signal. If I encounter a situation where I need to be anonymous I can and will have to take special measures for a while. Temporary anonymity is relatively easy. The identity management is a cinch.
That is aside of the obvious problem of phone numbers being recycled for re-issue after having been abandoned for a stretch of time.
Taking over a Signal account requires access to the phone number and the password used to register it (or waiting a week). And this will still not give the attacker access to the private keys; When these keys change, Signal will put an alert message on ongoing chats and ask for confirmation.
So yeah cool I can see that my boss, 4 ex-coworkers, my ex-bosses ex-wife, and I think a recruiter have all leaked my personal info to Clubhouse.
Case 1: me and my friend want to communicate on signal. If he messages me on Signal there won't be any way to know if that's actually him. I would have to call him and confirm if its really him. For a tech-savvy person who is like crazy about privacy this is not a big deal. But for a normal consumer this make them remove the signal.
Case 2: You want to message someone who you already communicate via WhatsApp or calls on signal. Again from an average consumer point. Calling them and asking them for their signal ID is again inconvenient. Imagine doing this for 400 contacts if you try to move from WhatsApp to signal.
There are other secure messaging app which doesn't require number or even email. But then again, you meet the person or call him and then get his id.
Not sharing mobile number is really for few selected cases and those people form a very small percentage of the market.
Having a feature similar to telegram where you share your number with selected people. Or have a disposal ID which can be used to start a chat and then dispose that ID so that it can'be used again or linked to your account. Something like this would make more sense and probably serve that small percentage of people as well. An ID which gets destroyed once it's used to make a connection. One time use ID only. This is a good way as well. Secret chats which stays on one device only, or you need separate credential for.
I should be able to make a sample app like this. It can be a good demo project.
yes. That is the point.IIRC there was also some Android API that could be used in the app to help, but I don't remember what it actually did atm.
Worse still, even if you block IME internet access on a device with a factory-maliciois IME, they could just upload the data using some other service on the device.
Installing a known-good IME seems like the only fix I can think of?
It would be the same if there were usernames, although those would be far harder to assign to a person. Thankfully, Signal is working on that feature and hopefully it's released soon. I'd like to one day not have any phone number at all. It's a system that feels very much antiquated...
> Wire's instant messages are encrypted with Proteus, a protocol that Wire Swiss developed based on the Signal Protocol.
That doesn't sound like "Wire uses the Signal Protocol" to me.
Yes, with published reports, but it looks like they haven't published new ones in a few years.
Has it been audited by security researchers?
This is usually a good assumption.
Bitwarden is open-source (both the server and clients) AND has been independently audited for a security review.