With today’s digital age forever being bombarded with its open approach, some you have started to wonder about privacy and personal information being transmitted all over the internet. To some degree, there’s no real “privacy”, we are ever so watched and are technically being recorded 24/7. It’s almost impossible to really have a “private moment” unless you have the money to fork for a full on Faraday cage in your own home.
To reclaim a bit of that privacy we have Signal, an application developed by Open Whisper Systems which offers encrypted and private SMS communication at a high level than the likes of “Whatsapp”. Signal is Free and Open Source, enabling anyone to verify its security by auditing the code. Signal is the only private messenger that uses open source peer-reviewed cryptographic protocols to keep your messages safe.
The protocol behind the application is design to work on the most constrained condition possible, which means that messages can be transferred and communicated easily on any network you may be connected to. Signal uses Curve25519, AES-256, and HMAC-SHA256. The security of these algorithms has been tested over many years of use in hundreds of different applications. Open Whisper Systems does not have access to the contents of any messages or calls sent or received by Signal users.
Bold claim some would say, however, they do speak the truth on the subject.
They’ve managed me to convert my texting SMS habits and it’s available in “Dark” mode for which I’m in love with. In the event that not all your contacts are on Signal, this falls back to standard SMS/Text messages. This allows you to still keep in contact with everyone. The application is very lightweight, it operates fast, it offers all the standard bells and whistles that one might want from a messaging app. You can still insert emoji’s, GIF’s and all the fun stuff you may be used to.
If you’d like to find out more you can check out the FAQ.
