Re:Snap Store administrators removed signal-desktop from Ubu...
by codedokode on Friday November 04, 2022 @05:18AM
(#33463812)
Yes, I made a mistake about the key. Adding a key is safe by itself. However by adding third-party repository you are granting Signal a permission to replace packages on your system (unless you manually whitelist package names in apt preferences), and by installing a package from Signal repository you grant it root access to your system.
Sadly debian-based distributions do not respect the principle of least privileges and grant unnecessary permissions to installation scripts.
Sadly, plenty of applications still take the old "apt-key" approach of adding the keys globally (e.g., installing keys to /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d), but I think Signal's installation process is the correct/recommended approach for distributing apt packages securely.