The Practical Limitations of End-to-End Encryption
canopic jug writes:
The cryptographer who blogs under the pseudonym Soatok has written an in depth discussion of the practical limitations of End-to-End Encryption on his blog. For some things, such as planning military strikes, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIFs) are the right tool for the job, while smartphone apps of any stripe are not.
In the aftermath of this glorious fuck-up by the Trump administration, I have observed many poorly informed hot takes. Some of these were funny, but others are dangerous: they were trying to promote technologies that claim to be Signal alternatives, as if this whole story was somehow a failure of Signal's security posture.
Not to put too fine a point on it: Switching to Threema or PGP would not have made a lick of difference. Switching to Matrix would have only helped if you consider unable to decrypt message" helping.
To understand why, you need a clear understanding of what end-to-end encryption is, what it does, what it protects against, and what it doesn't protect againt.
His prediction is that the White House will lash out at both The Atlantic and at Signal to distract from the catastrophic procedural failure which the administration demonstrated through this incident. He also observed that adding a journalist to the chat group would provide a good distraction from possibly compromised smartphones, devices which are notoriously insecure even when the stakes are much lower.
Previously:
(2025) Apple Pulls End-to-End Encryption From UK Rather Than Provide Government a Backdoor
(2024) U.S. Officials Urge Americans to Use Encrypted Apps Amid Unprecedented Cyberattack
(2024) Here's the Paper No One Read Before Declaring the Demise of Modern Cryptography
(2024) How I Got a Truly Anonymous Signal Account
... and more.
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