As explained in a paper titled A Formal Security Analysis of the Signal Messaging Protocol (PDF) from the International Association for Cryptologic Research, Signal has no discernible flaws and offers a well-designed and compromise-resistant architecture.
Signal uses a double rachet algorithm that employs ephemeral key exchanges continually during each session, minimising the amount of text that can be decrypted at any point should a key be compromised.
Signal was examined by a team of five researchers from the UK, Australia, and Canada, namely Oxford University information security Professor Cas Cremers and his PhDs Katriel Cohn-Gordon and Luke Garratt, Queensland University of Technology PhD Benjamin Dowling, and McMaster University Assistant Professor Douglas Stebila.
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The team finds some room for improvement which they passed on to the app’s developers, namely that the protocol can be further strengthened with negligible cost by using “constructions in the spirit of the NAXOS (authenticated key exchange) protocol” [PDF]” by or including a static-static Diffie-Hellman shared secret in the key derivation. This would solve the risk of attackers compromising communications should the random number generator become fully predictable.The paper does, however, cover only a subsection of Signal’s efforts, as it ignores non-Signal library components, plus application and implementation variations. It should therefore be considered a substantial starting point for future analysis, the authors say, rather than the final world on Signal.
Source: ‘Trust it’: Results of Signal’s first formal crypto analysis are in
Robin Edgar
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