Great. Now we just have to get Signal off AWS and we be good.
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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Signal puts a lot of effort into their threat model that assumes a hostile host (i.e. AWS). That's the whole point of end to end encryption, even if the host is compromised the attackers do not get any information. They even go as far as padding out the lengths of encrypted messages so everyone looks like they are sending identical blocks of data
I'm assuming that they were more referring to the outage that occurred today that pulled a ton of the internet services, including signal offline temporarily.
You can have all the encryption in the world, but if the centralized data point that allows you to access the service is down, then you're fucked.
no matter where you host, outages are going to happen… AWS really doesn’t have many… it’s just that it’s so big that everyone notices - it causes internet-wide issues
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Padding isn't anything special. Most practical uses of block ciphers require it.
sending identical blocks of data
Nitpicking here but assuming from the previous words in your comment that you mean blocks of data of identical length.
Although it should be as if we are sending multiples of identical size, I suppose.
Anyway, sorry for nitpicking.
or federated server
Would be very cool to be able to host a Signal homeserver.
https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ here is Moxi's take on that (former Signal CEO).
So I don't think it's happening.
they won't do that.
Matrix tried for quite a while to get interoperability, but signal is just too paranoid about distributed hosting or interoperability of their software/protocol. it's quite annoying
I guess the research doesn't have to be limited to signal. If other apps can benefit from it the more resilient "private communications over the internet" get.
So that's why Signal didn't send my messages very quickly today then, maybe.
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