News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure end-to-end encryption. Parent comment

Re:European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure e... by procflora on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @06:51PM (#39377236)
Isn't this what the "safety number" in Signal is for? Obviously you are still trusting many other things there (the client software, OS, hardware, whatever out of band method you use to compare the numbers, etc.), but I thought the safety number pretty much addresses the MITM concern specifically, if you bother to check it.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:European Court of Human Rights bans weakening of secure e... by hot_gril on Wednesday February 14, 2024 @07:16PM (#39377464)
Right, the issue is that nobody checks it and they don't really tell users upfront why they need to. It also notifies you if the number changes later, but seems like that can happen for benign reasons too, so it might go ignored. WhatsApp is similar, and idk if Telegram has this feature.

Someone could orient an E2EE app around these trusted identities, but it'd probably not be very popular.

[ Parent | on HN ]