Hacker Lexicon: What Is the Signal Encryption Protocol?
LAST WEEK, WITH little fanfare, Google announced a change that could soon make its 2 billion Android users worldwide far harder to surveil: The tech giant says it's rolling out a beta version of its Android messaging app that will now use end-to-end encryption by default. That level of encryption, while limited to one-on-one conversations, is designed to prevent anyone else from eavesdropping—not phone carriers, not intelligence agencies, not a hacker who has taken over the local Wi-Fi router, not even Google itself will have the keys to decrypt and read those billions of messages.
The news isn't just a win for global privacy. It's also a win for one particular encryption system: the Signal protocol, which is well on its way to accounting for a majority of the world's real-time text conversations. As this protocol becomes the de facto standard for encrypted messaging in most major services, it's worth understanding what sets it apart from other forms of end-to-end encrypted messaging...
Read the rest from Wired: Hacker Lexicon: What Is the Signal Encryption Protocol?
This almost borders on unbelievable for me! My first thought was, "Why would Google do something like this, considering how engrossed they are in the censorship and the surveillance of our lives and thoughts?!"
I had the same reaction to this, and also to encrypted gmail. It definitely seems like it runs counter to their business model.
Unless the objective is to eliminate the competition? Or to appear like the "good guy" superficially as a public relations tactic in these times of bad publicity? I'm of the belief that all of this unhackable encryption (blockchain included) will become a thing of the past when quantum computers advance further. Everything we have at the moment is based on binary code of 1s and 0s, but when a third layer of bits is added, hacking will go to a whole new level!!!
True. Researchers are already working on encryption algorithms that are resistant to quantum computing, but it will take years to replace the existing techniques, and there will almost certainly be some platforms that don't get updated in time.