Secure Messaging is a new innovation for confidential story-sharing and source protection, underpinning the Guardian’s commitment to investigative journalism. The Guardian has published the open source code for this important tech to enable adoption by other media organisations.
Packet data has headers that can identify where it’s coming from and where it’s going to. The contents of the packet can be securely encrypted, but destination is not. So long as you know which IPs Signal’s servers use (which is public information), it’s trivial to know when a device is sending/receiving messages with Signal.
This is also why something like Tor manages to circumvent packet sniffing, it’s impossible to know the actual destination because that’s part of the encrypted payload that a different node will decrypt and forward.
Wouldn’t you have to have some sort of MITM to be able to inspect that traffic?
That, or a court order telling your ISP or mobile operator to allow the sniffing. Or just the police wanting to snoop your stuff because they can. Not every country cares about individual or human rights, you know
It’s called traffic analysis
It’s called encryption
Packet data has headers that can identify where it’s coming from and where it’s going to. The contents of the packet can be securely encrypted, but destination is not. So long as you know which IPs Signal’s servers use (which is public information), it’s trivial to know when a device is sending/receiving messages with Signal.
This is also why something like Tor manages to circumvent packet sniffing, it’s impossible to know the actual destination because that’s part of the encrypted payload that a different node will decrypt and forward.
Wouldn’t you have to have some sort of MITM to be able to inspect that traffic?
TOR is what their already-existing tip tool uses.
That, or a court order telling your ISP or mobile operator to allow the sniffing. Or just the police wanting to snoop your stuff because they can. Not every country cares about individual or human rights, you know
Yes, but tor can be blocked at a firewall level, its packets are easy to identify. “Nations like China, Iran, Belarus, North Korea, and Russia have implemented measures to block or penalize Tor usage”