The head of the Signal app has criticized plans in the EU to allow messengers to have backdoors to enable automatic searches for criminal content. Signal is considered one of the most secure messengers.
It’s great as long as you can guarantee that the person you’re communicating on the receiving side does the same. Otherwise it’s useless as your messages will be read on the receiving device. In practice it will make private communication extremely cumbersome and niche.
Also, the authorities can backdoor your custom ROM device at will, when seized.
Not quite; Chat Control hearkens back to Apple’s doomed attempt at on-device CSAM filtering - the idea is that on-device images and message contents would be scanned for known hashes. This means a nation state could go fishing on devices for known content, but it wouldn’t allow them to indiscriminately sift through all the content at rest — they’d have to know what they were looking for.
That’s where the steganography comes in, because the hash based approach will fail if the content they’re looking for is obscured in some manner.
It’s great as long as you can guarantee that the person you’re communicating on the receiving side does the same. Otherwise it’s useless as your messages will be read on the receiving device. In practice it will make private communication extremely cumbersome and niche.
Also, the authorities can backdoor your custom ROM device at will, when seized.
I mean I don’t see them back dooring GOS anytime soon. But your right both ends need to have a custom ROM.
Steganography. There’s more than one way to protect your communication.
And encryption in transit is better than no encryption at all (assuming the baddies don’t already have full access to your phone data).
That’s the whole point of Chat Control 2.0
Not quite; Chat Control hearkens back to Apple’s doomed attempt at on-device CSAM filtering - the idea is that on-device images and message contents would be scanned for known hashes. This means a nation state could go fishing on devices for known content, but it wouldn’t allow them to indiscriminately sift through all the content at rest — they’d have to know what they were looking for.
That’s where the steganography comes in, because the hash based approach will fail if the content they’re looking for is obscured in some manner.