this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2025
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citation
EVERYTHING in Signal follows an encryption or tokenization chain. Not like crypto coins but real actual chain-of-custody type encryption workflows. It uses elliptical curve cryptography where the key for each message moves forward along an elliptic curve, which are excessively difficult to guess the factors for once it is selected if you are not the key holder. This means that even if someone cracks the key for a single message you sent, they are going to have to crack the key for every other message still as each one is different. Even the metadata is encrypted by the user's keys.
Signal doesnt have usernames in the traditional sense. It's phone number+6 digit pin hashed into an encrypted signature.
The signal company can't see anything you do besides account create date and last login date, even if they wanted to due to how their platform is set up.
Meanwhile, Matrix literally clones the metadata between servers when a user connects to and starts talking to users on another server, in plaintext (maybe encrypted at rest but not E2EE).
OK, and how is that different from the other chats?
You do know that at least Signal and Matrix use pretty much the same crypto, right?
And Matrix can be self-hosted, so I don't need to worry about what they can see anyway.
On this point alone Matrix appears more secure than Signal...
And Threema is Switzerland-based, so by default it's more trustful than a USA-based company.
The metadata is really important especially if you or anyone you talk to ends up being targeted. 95% of intelligence work is mapping out adversaries' communications networks..if you have that, you don't need to decrypt the contents because you already know who is talking to who. The federation of metadata alone is reason to avoid matrix for anything important.
Thank you for being one person in this thread that actually read and understood my comment.
A bunch of comments repeating "Signal is the most secure because I said so" was not helpful.
I just saw your reply to me and was about to say the same thing, but they worded it perfectly. And I did mention metadata as a key point in my original post.