So, I’m interested how the implementation of “Perfect Forward Secrecy” in Signal looks like, like does every messages has a different encryption key? or does it change over time like #whatsapp does? I tried to find any official documention of this, sadly did not find anything.
Thats why I’m asking, does anyone of you know smth about this and maybe can provide a link to a official source?
#signal #signalapp #privacy #encryption @signalapp @SignalUpdateInfo @privacy
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@sexy_peach So when I understood it right (just skimmed the text), the encryption keys changes per message?
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@sexy_peach Thank you very much! Just now wondering, handle WA this differently? Since Ig we all know this message which appears when the “keys” ig, changed
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@sexy_peach Okay, got it, ig.
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WhatsApp uses the encryption protocol developed for Signal, so I’d not expect them to be significantly different.
@Rose True, but there are still differences, for example Signal encrypts everything, while WA only encrypts chats and calls, so the implementation is a bit different, which maybe could be also in Signal with PFS.
The main advantages of Signal over WA is that Signal minimises the amount of metadata Signal has access to and promises to not store or analyse the little remaining metadata.
The data (as in: the actual message content) should be similarly secure in both.
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Don’t know about Signal but the way PFS usually works is there is something like a Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange. Each person generates a random (private) number, remembers it, crunches it mathematically into a public number, and sends the public number to the other person. Each then combines their private number with the public number that they got from the other person, and this (because of how DH works) cleverly gives both people the same secret number they use for the encryption, but the secret can’t be reconstructed without knowing at least one of the private numbers. Finally, the PFS part is simply that each person permanently deletes both the shared secret and the private number they generated for that exchange (they will create new ones next time they want to communicate). That means there is no way to reconstruct the secret and re-decrypt the message.
Of course, authentication also has to be added to all this.
For more info, probably easiest to look up Diffie-Hellman key exchange online.
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The PFS comes from deleting the secret DH parameters after you are done using them.
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