The New Feature of Signal Revealed

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The New Feature of Signal Revealed

Demand for strong encrypted messaging applications has increased recently, as data breaches turn out to be more common, along with increased concerns about government surveillance.  Signal, the popular end-to-end encrypted messaging service has been working on this new to add enhanced encrypted messaging experience for their users.  

Just like Signal lets users to make secure messaging, audio/video calls, this new feature enhances the security features, enabling developers to integrate various levels of encryption into the messaging application.

Of course, encryption messaging platforms are being used by a lot of users and businesses due to the increased concerns about data privacy.

Thankfully, open whisper systems have launched the latest feature of “sealed sender” to make it all easier — and this new addition will make it simpler for app users to hide the sender’s details while sharing the messages. Signal, the end-to-end encrypted messaging application, announced their new feature of sealed sender to enable hide the sender’s details and build strong data encryption into the messaging services. The new “sealed sender” feature of Signal, aims to limit the information transmitted through message communication.

 Going with the basic nature of the application, messages shared via Signal are encrypted, meaning only the sender and recipient can view the message content. But the latest beta version, enables users to encrypt their identity while sending the message. This means that the information about the sender will be hidden in the communication.

In a recent blog, Signal explains that it traditionally uses (TLS) Transport Layer Security protocol for validating sender’s identity followed by informing the recipient about it. This means where the messages are encrypted, both the sender’s and recipient’s identity can be evidently intercepted. But the new feature of Sealed Sender also encrypts the sender’s certificate. After which the recipient decrypts the information along with the sender’s details with his identity key.

Joshua Lund, a Signal developer writes “While the service always needs to know where a message should be delivered, ideally it shouldn’t need to know who the sender is. It would be better if the service could handle packages where only the destination is written on the outside, with a blank space where the ‘from’ address used to be”.

Users can further enable the feature to let the users field all the sealed sender communications from anybody, along with people who are not in the contacts list.

“This comes at the increased risk of abuse, but allows for every incoming message to be sent with ‘sealed sender,’ without requiring any normal message traffic to first discover a profile key,” Lund says.

As stated by developers of Signal, this new feature is an important step towards collecting, storing and transmitting least amount of information wherever possible for all the Signal users. “These protocol changes are an incremental step, and we are continuing to work on improvements to Signal’s metadata resistance. In particular, additional resistance to traffic correlation via timing attacks and IP addresses are areas of ongoing development,” Lund explains. “We do not collect or store any sensitive information about our users, and that won’t ever change.”

Open Whisper Systems, developer of Signal aims to provide a secure communication environment, free from those prying eyes. The Signal Protocol is used in Signal as well as Facebook-owned WhatsApp.

 source :- https://signal.org/