Introducing Automatic Key Verification
19 points by cinemast
19 points by cinemast
I'm not qualified to comment on the cryptography. But I remember seeing this appear in my Signal verification options a couple of weeks ago, and disregarding it because the help page said
Automatic Key Verification is available only when Signal has your contact’s phone number.
I am generally disappointed that Signal has been built around having a phone number as a hard requirement (I know this has been debated before, with pros and cons; the biggest of the latter is that it makes Signal much more susceptible to privacy breaches and censorship). I was hoping to see Signal move away from using them. This, however, now has them hang another feature off storing people's phone numbers. Even if it's very optional, I feel that's a step in the wrong direction.
Also, I was very curious to see who the "trusted auditors" were:
For Signal’s implementation of key transparency, Cloudflare and Trail of Bits serve as trusted third-party auditors
For reasons I cannot describe other than "bad vibes", I don't like that Cloudflare is one of them.
I am generally disappointed that Signal has been built around having a phone number as a hard requirement
There has been some news around this.
Signal CTO Ehren Kret said responding to a question at FUTO's Don't Be Evil conference:
"that is something we are looking a hopefully for later on this year adding a way to sign up without phone numbers. Uh the main uh downside at the moment and the reason we don't have that yet today is removing accounts who are are spamming people or otherwise engaging in abuse of the service is sort of our our primary way of protecting people from spam and other sort of issues like that that would affect the operational stability of the service."
About Signal spotted several commits on Signal's GitHub with commit messages that reference accounts with no phone numbers, such as "Don’t allow or set registration lock on accounts with no phone number," heavily suggesting that Signal is actively working on a feature allowing you to sign up without a phone number.
More references in Signal's source code suggest this feature will be called "Signal Login" and will indeed be a paid feature.
Since payment info can be just as identifying as a phone number, its unclear how Signal plans to protect the privacy of users' payment info.
Hm. I got briefly hopeful this is finally happening. Especially since for me the censorship part is not hypothetical -- it's extremely hard to get Signal's sign-up SMS in e.g. Russia (and elsewhere), especially if the person registering is not tech-savvy. I have some contacts that have been unable to sign up for Signal as a result.
But if it's paid, that would pretty much negate the improvements. I get that Signal is worried about spam, but in places where you can't get Signal's texts, you'll probably have a hard time paying them, too, even if you want to (and yes, you're once again subjected to KYC to use a service that claims to prioritise privacy). Let's see what it looks like if/when it comes out.
I don't like that Cloudflare is one of them.
Same, for whatever reason Cloudflare turned from the “frontier of the internet” into “crypto bro”. How am I supposed to trust them as a DNS, firewall and anything else related to security, while their latest product is a questionable “Agentic AI Wallet” that gives agents access to stablecoin cryptocurrency payments…
That's part of the "bad vibes" (the other big one for me is just how much of our digital infrastructure is now centralised on them).
To be fair, Signal has also played with cryptocurrency, albeit (thankfully?) without much commitment. But buried in the app settings you can still find a section for Payments, which will offer to sign you up for a coin no one has ever heard of.