Whatsapp rolled it out to all of its billion-plus users. The disappearing message feature, Marlinspike says, "is just something that automates that tidying practice."Īside from the app itself, the encryption protocol that Signal uses has become a kind of best-practice secrecy system for major tech services over the last year.
That feature only works, however, if Signal users continually delete their message logs. Signal uses a crypto technique called Perfect Forward Secrecy that encrypts every message with a different key, so that even if an eavesdropper who intercepts and records those messages manages steal a user's phone, the snoop can't decrypt old conversations. In fact, Marlinspike has long recommended that Signal users periodically delete their messages. "This is a collaborative feature for when everyone in the conversation wants the message history to be ephemeral." "We’re trying to make it clear this is not a feature that helps you win when your own contact is your adversary," Marlinspike says. (The recipient can take a screenshot of the app or even a picture of the screen with another camera.) But as he's seen how Signal's been adopted, he says he's come to see the feature more as a matter of convenience than security. Marlinspike says he'd resisted adding a disappearing message function for fear it would mislead users: Disappearing messages, he notes, can't protect your conversation from being revealed by the person you're communicating with.
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