<story><title>What Is the Signal Encryption Protocol?</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/signal-encryption-protocol-hacker-lexicon/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xiaomai</author><text>I think not having it disappear by default is reasonable. My biggest complaint about signal is how hard it is to preserve history (backing up &amp;#x2F; transferring to new devices).  I think the normal expectation is that your data is not going to automatically disappear unless you ask it to.</text></item><item><author>upofadown</author><text>This article mentions an important fact about forward secrecy:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Perfect forward secrecy is useless, it&amp;#x27;s important to note, if users don&amp;#x27;t delete their messages periodically.&lt;p&gt;Then:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;The Signal app offers disappearing messages that are automatically deleted after a certain time limit.&lt;p&gt;Which is not turned on by default. The user has to somehow know that they have to do this to get the benefit of forward secrecy. This seems all too common with contemporary encrypted messaging stuff. Really great features that depend on having the users behave in a way they normally would not.&lt;p&gt;Of course the app can do this wrong simply by failing to do a secure delete that actually removes the messages from the storage device. In the end the actual communications protocol doesn&amp;#x27;t make very much difference in the face of counter productive implementations; conceptual and&amp;#x2F;or technical.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>godelski</author><text>As someone that doesn&amp;#x27;t fret with the saving history part I&amp;#x27;m curious why people save their texts and back them up. Honestly it is a bit creepy to me. I can understand saving special texts (especially for a short time period) but it seems weird to me that people want to save texts from a year ago that talk about what I had for breakfast. There&amp;#x27;s something I&amp;#x27;m not getting here, can someone enlighten me? Like I&amp;#x27;ve never searched my texts for something that is more than a few weeks old. Any further back than that and I just directly ask the person (it is way faster).</text></comment>
<story><title>What Is the Signal Encryption Protocol?</title><url>https://www.wired.com/story/signal-encryption-protocol-hacker-lexicon/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>xiaomai</author><text>I think not having it disappear by default is reasonable. My biggest complaint about signal is how hard it is to preserve history (backing up &amp;#x2F; transferring to new devices).  I think the normal expectation is that your data is not going to automatically disappear unless you ask it to.</text></item><item><author>upofadown</author><text>This article mentions an important fact about forward secrecy:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;Perfect forward secrecy is useless, it&amp;#x27;s important to note, if users don&amp;#x27;t delete their messages periodically.&lt;p&gt;Then:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;The Signal app offers disappearing messages that are automatically deleted after a certain time limit.&lt;p&gt;Which is not turned on by default. The user has to somehow know that they have to do this to get the benefit of forward secrecy. This seems all too common with contemporary encrypted messaging stuff. Really great features that depend on having the users behave in a way they normally would not.&lt;p&gt;Of course the app can do this wrong simply by failing to do a secure delete that actually removes the messages from the storage device. In the end the actual communications protocol doesn&amp;#x27;t make very much difference in the face of counter productive implementations; conceptual and&amp;#x2F;or technical.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>asquabventured</author><text>When was the last time you moved devices? I was able to wirelessly import my entire years old messaging and contact database when I switched iOS devices ~10 months ago.  I don&amp;#x27;t recall if it used NFC, Bluetooth or having to be connected to the same WiFi network but it worked impressively well at the time.</text></comment>