Is it still viable to use Signal for privacy in 2026? It’s centralized, and has had many suspicious occurrences in the past.(Unopen source server code, careless whisper exploit which is still active as far as I know, and the whole mobile coin situation.)
Thoughts?
As per usual, the answer is “depends on your threat model”. For a lot of sensitive communications, the centralised design and therefore ability to correlate metadata is a no-go. But if you’re just using it e.g. as a WhatsApp replacement to message your friends, it’s fine. It’s still the most polished and normie-friendly e2ee foss messenger.
PRODUCT PITCH: Hey everyone, I have a great idea for a secure / private messaging service.
It’s hosted in the US, subject to its pervasive spying laws including national security letters.
Also I need all your phone numbers.
Also no you can’t host this yourself, I run the only server.
Everyone who uses signal and supports it, is falling for this pitch.
if you are super private person or want to be anonymous, maybe you can choose SimpleX.
IMHO the question depends on :
- who you are (boring, rando, political dissident, journalist, etc)
- who you talk to (family, friends, work, etc)
- what alternatives actually exist
So… sure Signal is not perfect but if you can’t convince your family members to move to DeltaChat it sure beats using WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.
The client is open source, so it doesn’t matter what the server code is, you can see everything the client sends and therefore tell what possible data is being collected.
It’s run by a non-profit so there’s no shareholders to please.
Your messages and decryption key are not stored on their servers.
It’s been independently audited.
They have publicly posted responses to user information requests where they only provide the account creation date and last access time.
The (admittedly incompetent) US government recommends using Signal (for non-classified information) and top officials have been caught using it (Houthi Working Group).
You can never be 100% sure, but it appears to have excellent security and privacy.
Not to mention the FBI admitted that the only data from Singal they get is when the account signed up and when they last connected and they are very unhappy about so little information.
and top officials have been caught using it (Houthi Working Group).
For me this is the gold seal.
These guys desperately don’t want records of their acts to become public record and they have the authority to outright ask US Intelligence ‘Can you guys get access to this?’ and the app they choose is Signal.
And then proceed to invite a random journalist to their group 😅
A lot of people use Signal. It may not be the best solution out there, but it is so, so, so much better than the proprietary alternates.
One good thing is that a normie can easily use it as an alternative to WhatsApp, since the app design is so similar. I mean, it is easy for family and friends to understand and start using Signal, compared to something like Matrix or XMPP.
And if someone needs a little more hardening, they could use the fork called Molly, which has a few more security benefits over the stock app.
Shit these are great features. I had never heard of it before.
Molly is an independent Signal fork for Android with improved features:
Fully FOSS Contains no proprietary blobs, unlike Signal
Encrypted Protects database with Passphrase Encryption
Multi-Device Pair multiple devices to a single account
Material You Extra theme that follows your device palette
UnifiedPush Ungoogled notification system
Automatic Locking When you are gone for a set period of time
RAM Shredding Securely shreds sensitive data
Ooh! And you can add an F-Droid repo!
https://molly.im/fdroid/
I wish this was available for iOS.
Yes. You will find a lot of randos saying no, but the consensus among security professionals and researchers is that it is still the current standard. Not to say that it doesn’t deserve scrutiny or criticism, or that other projects aren’t important to develop.
Also, will I be able to reach people with any alternatives? It’s not like they’ll all switch to the app I choose, or at least I’m not that popular for them to follow me anywhere, well… worse, I still have to open Messenger (FB/meta) from time to time to get in touch with some of them 🤮🤢
While centralisation continues to be a problem (as the recent AWS outage has shown), Signal continues to be the a sufficient compromise between privacy and usability that a non-technical user will actually use.
That said, I’m making contingency plans to set up an alternative for close family in case the US goes full retard and makes it inaccessible.
What’s your alternative?
I’m considering several, and haven’t made the decision yet: Matrix/Element, Briar, and Session are all on the table.
Not perfect (as recent news demonstrated) but still the standard The no-brainer choice for secure and private messaging
What’s the recent news?
Most likely this is referring to the case where they extracted messages from the notification history of an iPhone.
Which would be the situation with any app that has notifications that show content.
If you want to be perfectly safe here, you’d need to disable notification content. This has nothing to do with signal.
Oh yeah. As another comment pointed out. Users can control this by using hidden notifications. Not a sigbal issue.
But as I said it still is the standard and it is hard to find a better alternative
This isn’t a signal issue, it’s a notification issue.
Literally any app that you allow to use notifications would do the same thing.
If you want this to be more secure, you have to turn off notifications.
Just remember that if you, or anyone you are talking to, has notifications turned on (in the app itself), that conversation is now outside of signal and a lot easier to get to.
Not if you set notifications to not show any content. Other than the sender, of course, which could be problematic depending who sends the message.
Which is an everything problem, not a signal problem. Just in case it sounds like a signal problem.
This was recently kinda misrepresented in the media, in my opinion.
Yes, notifications can leave traces. But it’s traces on the device itself that can be forensically extracted. Though notifications are pushed through Apple’s/Google’s servers, the contents are encrypted end-to-end.
Doesn’t it depend on what’s in the notifications?
I trust Signal and like it a lot, but I do wish they’d remove the stupid MobileCoin rubbish.
Agreed! I won’t consider donating to them until they drop it.
You people are so fucking insufferable. You’ll freeload off of them but the second they try to pay the bills you screech.
I’m SURE, you were totally going to pay you just saw the coin and turned away 🙄
Session is good, and could definitely use some funding if you’re able. it’s a fork of Signal, but decentralised (I think?)
Do they not get enough from the CIA?
no, because if they did, they wouldn’t be on their deathbed https://itsfoss.com/news/session-call-for-donations/
I hadn’t actually looked into the project, and just responded, with a knee-jerk reaction, to a no-name Signal fork.
Having glanced at it now, I can confidently say “lol. lmao”.
We took out the Perfect Forward Secrecy and replaced it with Blockchain™.
Founder and CTO is 12 and wants to talk to you about Buttcoin.
Damn, Hanlon’s Razor strikes again.
You may want to read Why not Signal?, but I still use it.
I think the text is somewhat dubious in its arguments, but this (and the arguments built on this assertion) is just plain wrong:
[Signals servers have] a few important pieces of data;
Message dates and times Message senders and recipients (via phone number identifiers)
Signal clients implement the Pond protocol. As a result, Signals servers know who a message is for (obviously, how else do you get the message) but cannot know who it is FROM.
I’ve been playing around with implementing a secure/private messenger demo for myself, and have been consistently impressed with how privacy preserving Signal is when reading their papers and code. I wish it was selfhostable, but apart from that, it’s great.
The server would be NICE to be OSS, but ultimately, privacy breaches are prevented client/protocol side.
Signal clients implement the Pond protocol. As a result, Signals servers know who a message is for (obviously, how else do you get the message) but cannot know who it is FROM.
Give me ssh access to signal’s centralized US-hosted server so I can verify this (IE that their centralized DB doesn’t store).
Otherwise this is a “trust me bro” claim, considering they have the phone numbers of everyone who signed up, and are the routing service for the messages you send.
I don’t really understand why you think this, can you explain? Signal stores, and has access to, no message metadata. They don’t know who your contacts are, which group chats you’re in, when you’re sending messages, or who you’re talking to.
To be convinced of this, take a look at the client source code, and compile the app yourself. None of this information ever leaves your phone without being encrypted or otherwise masked. No analysis of their server code is required to be convinced of this.
Signal stores, and has access to, no message metadata.
Phone numbers are the most important metadata you can give them, far more important than message content. It means your real identity / name and address. With phone numbers you can build social networking graphs: who talked to who, and when.
To be convinced of this, take a look at the client source code, and compile the app yourself.
Client source code is irrelevant here. Signal is a centralized service, you can’t verify what their US-based server is actually running (although they did go a full year without publishing any server updates at one point, until they received a lot of backlash for it).
None of this information ever leaves your phone without being encrypted or otherwise masked.
You gave them your phone number / real identity when you signed up. The most important piece of info they could possibly give them, you already did.
Can you explain how signal will build a social network graph when it doesn’t know who sent any message, which group chats you’re in, or who is on your contact list? Again, none of this ever leaves your device without being encrypted, which you can check by looking at the client source code.
@dessalines@lemmy.ml being as sharp as always, thank you for sharing this! I somehow missed that essay in the past, and recently even had a discussion where I argued in favor of signal. His overview makes some great points that shouldn’t be dismissed offhandedly. The important point is to not make the mistake of shunning signal in favor of an even less secure alternative. Also the user’s threat model should be taken into account. Those who aren’t anticapitalists (yet) might need to worry less about the concerns.
Fuck dessalines tho
Yes but using it though Molly is more secure
