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by saagarjha 660 days ago
Maybe they should add good backup encryption then lest people decide they don’t want to use Signal because it doesn’t have this feature and end up with weak/no backup encryption.
1 comments

I'm pretty sure they would, if they could think of a good way. Usable, yet secure backup encryption is so far an unsolved problem, as far as I can tell.

The two options, roughly speaking, are: Force users to store some high-entropy passphrase (which most users will then store somewhere not very secure), or let them pick their own passphrase (which won't be very good). This is what WhatsApp does.

A third one would be to allow a short passphrase and guard that by a server-side HSM or maybe SGX, which Signal seems to be somewhat fond of; I'm glad they're not doing that.