Comment by elvisloops

Those are the breaks though when catering to a large audience with wildly differing threat models. Do you throw away users that are looking for a vague sense of security so they run off somewhere else less secure because you lack some feature?

If you are just looking for "secure(TM)[X]", you are making a mistake somewhere anyway.

If your life or livelihood depends on it, you learn what the impact of every choice is and you painstakingly keep to your opsec.

Somewhere between the two user action becomes a necessity. You need to judge where that point is for you and take responsibility for it because nobody else can guarantee it.

These things can still be used as evidence. The process used by the police of a rogue country (or any other adversary) isn't a cryptographer's highly technical wet dream or nightmare. They simply look at the screen of your phone saying you sent or received a message, and as far as the adversary is concerned, that proves you sent or received it. Even if you didn't. (Actually, they use Cellebrite and just trust whatever the Cellebrite analyzer outputs, which is basically what your screen would have said)

I've yet to see a protocol that lets you convincingly insert fake messages into both sides of your own chat history, especially in a way that isn't detectable by say, sqlite rowid order, but that would be an interesting idea for where to take this sort of thing.

AFAIK, it has the same security as before. Perfect forward secrecy means that if someone starts recording encrypted messages in transit and two years later obtains an encryption key, they cannot use that key to decrypt the messages they recorded earlier (because of re-keying).

On the other hand, if an adversary captures one of the group participants' phone and breaks device security, and the chat was recorded on that device, then they can access all recorded chats. By the same token, no cryptography can protect against a malicious group participant who records messages.

In the same scenario, cloud backups seem to merely imply that the same adversary can obtain the cloud backup key and therefore decipher the cloud backups if they get their hands on it. They won't need that, however, since the group chat history is already stored on the device. If no chats were recorded on the device at all the situation would be different.

Disappearing messages were never a real thing in the first place. You can have a gentleman's agreement that the person you send your message to will delete it after reading it, there's no way to guarantee anything beyond that.

(Fair point though that probably "disappearing" messages shouldn't be included in backups since that obviously prevents them from being deleted. Idk if Signal implements that or not.)

> encrypts it with a static key

What type of static key? If it's just a big symmetric key that isn't derived from an asymmetric handshake of some type then no, that's not our current understanding of the PQ threat model.