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by milge 3478 days ago
I've been thinking a lot about PGP and other encrypted messengers lately. It's incredibly hard to get a lot of people to agree on one messaging app besides default SMS. I wish there was an open source suite of tools for mobile/desktop that easily layered PGP on top of SMS/email experience and would fall back in the absence of keys. Perhaps bluetooth for swapping keys with friends. It's something that needs to be seamless enough that the end user can't tell the difference. I don't think messaging encryption will achieve mass adoption until something like that is built or built into mobile OS's.
3 comments
erelde 3478 days ago
Carriers would need to change the way they handle SMS, and everything a carrier does is subject to state regulations. And states seem to like clear text.
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milge 3478 days ago
Why's that? I understand the message would increase in size because of the encryption, but I think it would be technically feasible now. Didn't even apple just introduce encryption into their messenger? My issue with apple's encryption is it's closed source and apple only.
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wyager 3478 days ago
Apple's iMessage just detects when the other party is using an iOS device and sends them an iMessage instead of an SMS. The GP is right; cell service is so aggressively regulated that there's no hope of carriers adopting a better standard, so the best we can hope for is that at some point mobile OS distributors agree on some open standard like the Signal protocol.
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heartbreak 3478 days ago
iMessage end-to-end encryption is not a recent introduction. It has been in place for several years, though I can't find the exact iOS version it was introduced in.
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milge 3478 days ago
Recent to me is the last few years, technology-wise. Your timeline may look different.
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heartbreak 3478 days ago
Fair point. We are talking about a 5 year old product though...
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mtgx 3478 days ago
That's pretty much how TextSecure used to work for SMS, but you still needed to get people to use it for SMS.
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mnw21cam 3478 days ago
> ...bluetooth for swapping keys...

First rule of PGP keysigning parties - don't bring a computer. (Or at least if you do, don't turn it on.)

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