this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
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Signal’s sealed sender does a good job at knowing you’re sending a message, but not who to. All it’ll know on the receiving end is that a message was sent to it.
Of course people have found other methods of identifying this but sealed sender does cover most of the low hanging fruit.
Signal does also purposefully attempt to find ways to not collect any metadata, whilst also making it more difficult for anyone attacking to the servers to find anything. (e.g. ORAM for Secure Enclave operations)
My understanding is that meta used E2EE on your messages themselves, but everything else is up for grabs.
Don't buy into this, this is just marketing. I'm not saying that Signal is acting in bad faith, only that they chose to design a communication silo with themselves at the helm instead of a federation of servers/providers united by the same protocol. Because of that, they own all accounts, and have the monopoly of messages being routing on the network. Of course there is no difficulty for them knowing who's addressing whom, how often, with what kind of payload, by topology. "Sealed senders" and "secure enclave contacts discovery" is just techno babble meaning "trust us, bro. Especially because you have no choice, anyway".
No, I don’t think I will
I’ll trust what the cyber security and privacy experts say.
Is your source for "what privacy experts say" a sad jpeg meme, really?
Also, no matter what some distracted expert might say, the only fact that matters is that none of Signal's marketing claims are verifiable: the feature you are referring to happens server-side. Nobody but Signal knows what runs server-side. The guarantee of "not knowing who's talking to whom" isn't built into the protocol itself. This is where trust enters the picture.
The dominant paradigm in cybersecurity is that trust is not proof of anything. Math is. And "sealed senders" isn't that.