The Signal Private Messaging application continues to evolve. It was announced after two years ago that Edward Snowden said he used it daily, then released his client for desktop, and after Trump’s victory his discharges soared for his promised commitment to fight censorship and government espionage.
Now, the encrypted messaging application has just updated its Android and iOS clients implementing the ability to make private video calls. At the moment it is a function that explains that it is in beta, so they will be unfolding it bit by bit to receive feedback from users that allows them to finish polishing it.
“This represents a completely new calling infrastructure for Signal and should increase the quality of the voice call,” explain their people in their blog. “We believe it is a great improvement, but we are implementing it in stages to gather feedback from people with different devices, networks and regions, to ensure there are no surprises when it is enabled by default for everyone.”
But despite reaching the two main mobile operating systems, it is the iPhone that take the best part thanks to the use of Apple’s CallKit in iOS 10. This makes the version for these Signal devices allow you to answer calls from the lock screen and send a record of who you’ve called and for how long to your iCloud account.
In any case this is a completely optional function, and if you are an iOS user and want to have the same type of security and privacy in video conferencing as in the rest of the functions of the app, it is best to disable it. Both the possibility of video conferencing on Android and iOS and registration on iOS are optional functions in beta that you can activate from the advanced options of the application.
VoIP encryption also evolves
In addition to implementing Apple’s calling system, Signal has also redesigned its VoIP protocol to receive video conferencing and simplify protection by preventing someone from supplanting during calls or performing man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept them.
So far Signal has generated only two words from the encryption system, and if the words match the caller and the caller, the call was established without the possibility of someone intercepting them. In the new version this system disappears, and both voice calls and video conferences use the same identification system as your messaging system , which simply warns users if the encryption key of their contact has changed suspiciously.
This means that if before Signal was a split application with two types of technology for messages and voice calls, with the call of videoconferencing everything has been simplified, and all functions use the same type of security. For the user this means that the process of making voice calls or video calls will be much simpler and similar to any other application, although it does so by sacrificing some of its security.
Be that as it may, Signal continues to evolve. And that the application that has been made strong from the beginning thanks to its “anti-government” encryption systems keeps going ahead of the pressure that is beginning to get into the rest of conventional messaging apps. And let’s not forget that encrypted messages are no longer a rarity, and that even WhatsApp has its own system.