Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

whispersystems.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 386 posts

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#21

Post by LeoPanthera »

schlowmo wrote: post #6

I should use this as a strong argument for the rest of my no-please-not-another-instant-messenger-i-stay-with-whatsapp-contacts: When whatsapp is implementing the signal protocol, why should one use whatsapp in the first place?[1] I hope this good advertisement gives signal another round of traction. [1] Ok, you've got me. The less techie contacts will swing the feature-bat and the other already use signal.

"Normal" people will not have their choice of messenger swayed by any argument that uses the word "protocol".

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#22

Post by greenspot »

Great news. I'm just wondering why Facebook/Zuck is doing this. Is he fearing the competition–all the other E2E messengers out there?

I'm asking because I could imagine that Whatsapp might get banned in some countries soon (as recently happened in Brazil) and thus, lose market share.

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#23

Post by erkkie »

mike_hearn wrote: post #14

This is really excellent. A few thoughts: 1) They seem to have replaced TLS/SSL between client and server with "Noise Pipes". Based on a couple of minutes Googling this seems to be a brand new one-man protocol from Trevor Perrin (the same guy who did Axoltl on which Signal is based). At least, I'd never heard of it. I wonder if this is the first inkling of a post-TLS future? http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html 2) It'…

Reproducible builds help with 3) as well. There was just an announcement re that a few days ago: https://whispersystems.org/blog/reproducible-android/

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#24

Post by humanrebar »

mike_hearn wrote: post #14

This is really excellent. A few thoughts: 1) They seem to have replaced TLS/SSL between client and server with "Noise Pipes". Based on a couple of minutes Googling this seems to be a brand new one-man protocol from Trevor Perrin (the same guy who did Axoltl on which Signal is based). At least, I'd never heard of it. I wonder if this is the first inkling of a post-TLS future? http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html 2) It'…

> What's the next step?

Is there any work on encrypting group chat sessions?

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#26

Post by mike_hearn »

moxie wrote: post #20
mike_hearn wrote: post #14

This is really excellent. A few thoughts: 1) They seem to have replaced TLS/SSL between client and server with "Noise Pipes". Based on a couple of minutes Googling this seems to be a brand new one-man protocol from Trevor Perrin (the same guy who did Axoltl on which Signal is based). At least, I'd never heard of it. I wonder if this is the first inkling of a post-TLS future? http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html 2) It'…

> They seem to have replaced TLS/SSL between client and server with "Noise Pipes". WhatsApp was already using a custom protocol instead of TLS. We worked with them to transition over to Noise Pipes, which has some advantages over what they were doing before. Also, we've renamed Axolotl to Signal Protocol: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-inside-and-out/

Thanks.

As an aside, what's with Nietzsche? He seems to crop up in your screenshots quite frequently.

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#27

Post by mike_hearn »

humanrebar wrote: post #24
mike_hearn wrote: post #14

This is really excellent. A few thoughts: 1) They seem to have replaced TLS/SSL between client and server with "Noise Pipes". Based on a couple of minutes Googling this seems to be a brand new one-man protocol from Trevor Perrin (the same guy who did Axoltl on which Signal is based). At least, I'd never heard of it. I wonder if this is the first inkling of a post-TLS future? http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html 2) It'…

> What's the next step? Is there any work on encrypting group chat sessions?

Please read the articles. It already says that those are encrypted, as well as voice calls. Apparently once everyone is upgraded, nothing will be unencrypted. Their white paper also describes the protocols used in quite a lot of detail.

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#29

Post by martindevans »

mike_hearn wrote: post #14

This is really excellent. A few thoughts: 1) They seem to have replaced TLS/SSL between client and server with "Noise Pipes". Based on a couple of minutes Googling this seems to be a brand new one-man protocol from Trevor Perrin (the same guy who did Axoltl on which Signal is based). At least, I'd never heard of it. I wonder if this is the first inkling of a post-TLS future? http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html 2) It'…

> It's a shame to see key words be killed off by internationalisation concerns [....] I hope further research here can develop better replacements for encoding short binary strings in i18n friendly ways

I rather like the urbit way of encoding numbers. I can't remember the exact details but it's something like: There are 256 unique three letter words (all nonsense, but deliberately picked to be possible to pronounce). Each word is mapped to a byte and then a blob of binary data becomes a nonsense word.

So for example "tasfyn-partyv" instead of "1242B24A".

Post reply on HN