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A comment on Signal 2.0 released with private messaging support. Parent comment

Re:Signal 2.0 released with private messaging support by mahyarm on Monday March 02, 2015 @09:55PM (#9135850)
TBH I think keeping SMS separate from an ip based communications method is better. Lets not pretend that SMS is secure. The only thing I would find missing are quick reply APIs.
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Re:Signal 2.0 released with private messaging support by scott_karana on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @12:30PM (#9139042)
How are IP and SMS traffic different, other than "packet" size and encoding constraints? Both are easily interceptable and spoofable, necessitating strong crypto.

I don't see how chacha20/poly1305 is somehow "worse" over SMS.

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Re:Signal 2.0 released with private messaging support by nzp on Tuesday March 03, 2015 @03:28PM (#9140485)
The difference is mostly that in case of SMS, metadata leaks to carriers. In case of Signal/TextSecure/RedPhone, some limited metadata leaks to Google Cloud Messaging and Apple's equivalent platform (I can't remember the name). That's necessary because of scaling problems with push messages, but I understand there is work going on to develop a self contained alternative using WebSockets.
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