Comment by mike_hearn

Signal PKI doesn't really work for me, conceptually. I mean, Signal is great work, but the approach to key management and federation seems like it undermines the regular security of the approach.

The problem is the key servers are run by the same people who control the app. This helps if the key server specifically gets compromised and the target is verifying, but for many attacks people worry about it's actually not the key servers specifically that get popped, it's an employee laptop or the employee themselves via subpoena, policy change etc. And for those cases nothing stops the app itself being changed to show you a false safety number, possibly by Apple without the app vendor even knowing.

So we end up with a rather curious and fragile threat model that only really helps in the case of a classical buffer overflow or logic error that grants an adversary the ability to edit keys and not much else. It's very far from "you don't have to trust the providers of Signal" which is what people tend to think the threat model is.

And honestly, a technique that combats very specific kinds of infrastructure compromise are too low level IMO to bother advertising to users. The big tech firms have all sorts of interesting security techniques in place to block very specific kinds of attacks on servers but they generally don't advertise them as primary features. If you have to trust the service provider, and with both Signal and WhatsApp you do, then are you really getting much more than with bog standard TLS? After all forward secrecy achieves nothing if the router provider is diligently deleting messages after forwarding them to the receiving device - the feature only has value if you assume the provider is recording all messages to disk and lying about it, in the hope of one day being able to break the encryption of ... their own app. Hmmm.