MORE SECURED MESSAGING ON ITS WAY FOR SIGNAL

WhatsApp is reportedly becoming just like Instagram, where you will see adverts in-between your bestie's status updates, how original? So Singal has decided to up their game, and make their platform more secure to keep user information safe.

Signal, the messaging app with arguably the best end-to-end encryption around (no offence Telegram), is rolling out a new feature that will further protect the identities of message senders (yes!). Since the start of Signal, they never collected or kept any data from their users', so they basically never planned the death of social media like Facebook, something which Signal can be proud of.

Now a new feature is on its way, which will hide a sender's metadata inside the 'envelope' of an encrypted message, which will make it even MORE SECURE by keeping real-world person data as SAFE AS POSSIBLE (hear that Facebook?).

It works like this, the app encrypts the message as normal with Signal Protocol, then places the sender’s information into an 'envelope' as a certificate containing the sender's phone number, public identity and expiry time — so the sender can be validated. The envelope is also encrypted or 'sealed'. We don't want any spoofing, do we? Then the encrypted message, as well as the sealed envelope needed to validate that message is sent.

Authentication is taken care of on the other side of the line, without revealing the sender's information. When the message is delivered, the app will pop open the envelope and validate the certificate, decrypting the message if everything is as it should be — all without exposing sender information to outside forces.

Although this sounds slightly dodgy — as though random people could send messages without the receiver knowing who it is — the system still links every message to a phone number which could identify a person outside of the app. This just means that Signal is an app for people who really value their privacy.

"While the service always needs to know where a message should be delivered, ideally it shouldn’t need to know who the sender is," Signal said in a blog post.

The new feature will be enabled by default in an upcoming update, but first, beta testing (scheduled for "very soon") will have to be taken care of. We don't want no bugs.