This is a difference in the threat model.

Signal's threat model is that everything around you is hostile to you, except the parties you interact with. You are an undercover rebel in a totalitarian sect which would sacrifice you to Cthulhu if they see your chat history. Losing it is much better than disclosing it.

Your threat model is likely random black hat hackers who would try to get into your communication channels and dig some dirt to blackmail you, or to impersonate you to scam your grandmother out of several thousand dollars. Signal protects quite well against it. But the chance of this happening even in an unencrypted channel is low enough. You don't mind making the security posture somehow weaker, but preserve the possibility to restore your chat history if your secure device is lost or destroyed.

I suppose the problem could be solved by an encrypted backup with a long key which you keep on a piece of paper in your wallet, and / or in a bank in a safe deposit box. Ideally it would be in the format that the `age` utility supports.

But there is no way around that paper with the long code. If this code is stored on your device, and can be copied, it will be copied by some exploit. No matter how inconspicuous a backdoor you are making, somebody will find it and sneak into it. Should it happen in a publicized case, the public opinion will be "XYZ is insecure, run away from it!".

> If this code is stored on your device, and can be copied, it will be copied by some exploit.

Yeah... We really need some key-management hardware where the secrets can be copied by some channel that is not the primary one. This used to be more common, before the IT companies started pushing everything into the cloud.

I have recently started to see computer boards with write protection for the UEFI data, what is a related thing that also did go away because mostly of Microsoft. So, maybe things are changing back.

> I have lost chat histories more times than I can remember, and I have to be extra diligent about this these days.

As per Signal’s diehard proponents, losing chat history is a feature, not a bug (I’m not being facetious when saying this, and you can see comments of this kind in Signal related threads here).

Edited to add: I don’t agree with that premise and have long disliked losing chat history.

I know you are not being facetious. My problem is random Joe on the street sees it as a bug. He really does care more about actually being able to talk with his wife than Signal’s mathematically correct principles. He needs it to be reliable first, secure second.

> He needs it to be reliable first, secure second.

Than he should use something else. I need signal to be secure first, second and third and reliable in edge cases like this a distant number.

Perhaps it’s a marketing problem, then. Signal is marketed as a secure and full-featured alternative to things like WhatsApp and iMessage. Most people start reading that sentence after the word “secure”, and then are surprised and disappointed when a device replacement loses all their history.

I think it would be better if Signal more loudly communicated the drawbacks of its encryption approach up-front, warning away casual users before they get a nasty surprise after storing a lot of important data in Signal.

I’ve heard Signal lovers say the opposite—that getting burned with data loss is somehow educational for or deserved by casual users—and I think that’s asinine and misguided. It’s the equivalent of someone saying “ha! See? You were trading away privacy for convenience and relying on service-provider-readable message history as a record all along, don’t you feel dumb?”, to which most users’ will respond “no, now that you’ve explained the tradeoffs…that is exactly how I want it to work; you can use Signal, but I want iMessage”.

It shouldn’t take data loss to make that understood.

Or compare the nasty surprises lurking in Whatsapp.

We'll see it intentionally backdoored this decade. Signal can afford to, eg, tell the UK or EU to go fuck themselves. Meta won't.

You've been downvoted, but I think that's a fair take. There will always be tension between security and usability; it's difficult (impossible?) to do the absolute best in both metrics.

Signal's development team can decide that they prioritize security over usability to whatever degree they like, and that's their prerogative. That may result in fewer users, and a less than stellar reputation in the usability space, but that's up to them. And if we (the unpaying user base) don't like it, we are free to use something else that better meets our needs.

Maybe an answer is to have a control for each message that you can set to plain text or encrypted based on a cloud backed up key of encrypted based on a key only on this device. The you could message "hi mum, running late" without complications while being able to hard encrypt when you want?

Signal is already complication free (at least until your phone falls in a lake) making the control useless.

(And you probably don't need to worry about losing the 'running late' message in the lake... The need for good encryption and reliable backup on any given message is likely somewhat correlated.)

Yeah, but if use proton for everything else and signal only for my secret world domination plans, traffic analysis will be so much easier…

Congrats on not being one of the people concerned about being targeted by their government, now or in the future.

Hundreds of millions are not so lucky.

(i am a security person who prioritizes security over usability but) you missed the point a bit. If a privacy program is used only by people that have something to hide it turns into a smoking gun. If you care about being targeted by government you should really hope regular people use signal a lot, because government absolutely has (or can procure) a list of people that use signal.

Bro, my mom uses signal with her friends and she's like almost 70. Signal works well enough.

GP here. I agree. I should’ve stated that I don’t like losing chat history and have seen that as a problem with Signal.

I have edited my previous comment to reflect that I don’t like losing chat history.

Signal has a backup service in beta, that you can use right now.

My company recently really cut back on slack retention. At first I was frustrated, but we all quickly got over it and work carried on getting done at the same pace as before and nothing really got impacted like many of us imagined it might.

That bears little resemblance to the Signal concerns. The reason people are worried about losing their personal messages is not lost productivity.

It's also not even really the same situation. A more apt analogy would be, if switching work laptops sometimes meant you could no longer read any Slack history.

I'd hate this, slack is an extension of my memory and it being long lived and searchable can be a super power - you don't have to remember all the details of everything, just enough of the who, what, when to find the rest.

It's fine until you need evidence someone agreed to something months ago but all records have been deleted.

Yeah, mail is the primary source of this.

Once communication with my customers moved to teams. I've had a very hard time to find historical agreements and decisions.

I try very hard to create a robust system for ADR logging now. And not just for system architecture. But for all decisions and agreements in my projects and across changes.

Methinks the better solution here is to get better friends?

Doesn't really work in an org with 100s of people and where emails are automatically deleted after 6 months.

Well I don't think most people choose who they work with. Even if you like your team a lot, you might have a discussion with someone from another team or division, and that's where it's useful to have a good chat history haha.

I expect that some types of people (in middle management, especially) may see the lack of this as a good thing.

A certain type of person sees this as a feature, not a bug.

So, the requirement is a system to store all your keys and that it can be duplicated as many times you wish. It looks like a local password manager, let's say keepass. I use it and have copies of the encrypted db on every device of mine, plus the client to access the passwords. I don't know if it qualifies for dumbness but it feels pretty robust. It survived the fall into the lake test (a river in my case.)

But I see every customer of mine using web based password managers, because they want to share and update passwords with all their team. Of course those password managers can use E2E encryption and many do, but my instinct is that if you are using somebody's else service for your data, you can be locked out from your data.

Anyway, it's the concept of having many passwords and having to manage them that's not dumb enough. The most that people do is letting the browser store and complete passwords. The password can be the same 1234pass on every single site.

Web-based password manager user here! It's worth noting that Bitwarden and 1Password (probably all the others too) let you export all of your data into an encrypted archive, so anyone who does this periodically won't be "locked out".

(Naturally, this requires extra effort on the users' part, so who knows how many are actually using this ability.)

Even better I run vaultwarden on the cheapest AWS instance using tailscale. This lets me make S3 backups of the disk easily.

I set up automatic backups of WhatsApp to my self-hosted Nextcloud once. Since you need 'tested backups', I tried to decrypt these WhatsApp backups independent of my phone, but this was not possible. You need the original device. There are some hacks online, but they are always out of date.

I am tending now to running Mautrix Whatsapp bridge and backing up my data through this.

Ask yourself. If you want things to be encrypted by default in the world, would a florist be able to self host nextcloud?

Agreed. I am still unhappy, but perhaps this is entirely my problem.

Apple/Google passkeys.

Two problems: Apple. And Google.

Indeed, passkeys would seem to represent a step forward from single-device to single-account.

Passkeys are often stored/locked per device?

But then Apple or Google can control your access to any account that uses those passkeys. We need a protocol where I can store the same passkey on multiple cloud providers

my proposal devices is like yubikey but instead of yubikey hardware in place like USB devices form

its in the form of ring or bracelet, its small enough and can be carried everywhere with you all the time

its use NFC like technology, it works without battery, fast and "secure enough" for 99% of people

what if the device is stolen???? we can add authorization like biometric (fingerprint etc) while touching devices so it can be sure the real owner is "giving" auth

The problem is not a personal hardware security module, as you noted we have them. The problem is that people want redundancy that undermines the point. If you can easily have a copy of your ring just in case, how do you know who has done that process and watches you all the time? Biometrics sounds like a solution yet they are implemented as a cosmetic security layer and this situation is pointless to fix since we leave them everywhere we go.

if people want to copy then let them copy

-how is that secure????

we would let only 1 device active at a time

if you think secure enclave with Biometric security is "weak" then no one is secure

if you think combination of (fingerprint,DNA,blood variance,retina, star time + position, mental memory etc) is not enough then no one is enough

(we are assuming this is future where we can access all this technology) << this is important point here

also if this is not enough, ppffttt (I dont want to go here) Neuralink device that lives under your skin

Maybe I'm old but I never expect chat history to be a permanent thing. It's like talking to someone, it should be ephemeral.

If you need a record, use email. Recording and archiving every conversation with someone is just weird.

Thanks for listening, now you dang kids can get off my lawn

There is absolutely no reason not to store and index text chats since they are so little data.