Signal is finally bringing its secure messaging to the masses
I&#x27;m hoping someone here has some insight they can share, because I&#x27;ve not really seen it addressed elsewhere.<p>As per the linked article:<p>&gt; Another new feature it&#x27;s testing, called &quot;secure value recovery,&quot; would let you create an address book of your Signal contacts and store them on a Signal server, rather than simply depend on the contact list from your phone. That server-stored contact list would be preserved even when you switch to a new phone. To prevent Signal&#x27;s servers from seeing those contacts, it would encrypt them with a key stored in the SGX secure enclave that&#x27;s meant to hide certain data even from the rest of the server&#x27;s operating system [1].<p>I assume that this is an offshoot or a continuation of what Signal started a few years back with Private Contact Discovery, a truly difficult problem considering the amount of user data and metadata Signal wants to avoid collecting [2].  It&#x27;s a hell of a job, and I commend Signal&#x27;s efforts.<p>Assuming I&#x27;m right, I&#x27;m curious as to why Signal is going down this road, specifically, relying on SGX (or any proprietary vendor solution) for security, or if they should.  Due to the spate of speculative execution vulnerabilities in Intel hardware, it would seem to me (a layman) that this is a bad approach that will create more work for them down the line, and may rely too heavily on a single set of features.  The Foreshadow attack was one that supposedly compromised SGX, with full mitigation only being possible with hardware revisions [3].  Even then, it may not be safe to assume that&#x27;s the end of problems.  Only recently, another attack on SGX was found, specifically, PlunderVolt [4], which at least can be supposedly mitigated via microcode update vs hardware refresh.  Still, it seems like shaky ground, especially to be building additional Signal features upon.<p>Much further down the list of concerns, it seems like all these SGX-reliant features lock them into using Intel&#x27;s platform exclusively.  It&#x27;s probably neither here nor there, but is this something they should be concerned about, or is that just the price to be paid for the advanced privacy features Signal offers?  Is there any effort to disconnect these features from the hardware platform?  Is it even possible?  Should they?  Am I even asking the right questions?<p>My worry is that Signal finally reaches some form of feature parity with the biggest messengers (I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s there, mostly), SGX gets broken in a way that&#x27;s not easy to fix, and all this time and effort will have been wasted, especially if they have to roll back user features which grow the platform in order to maintain safety.<p>I ask all this having no solutions myself, unfortunately.  I&#x27;m neither dev nor cryptographer, only someone curious with some mild technical leanings.  I generally lump myself in with the average user crowd, knowing just enough to be saddled with the &#x27;Family&#x27;s IT Person&#x27; label, but not enough to actually work in the field...as such, forgive any ignorance or obvious mistakes on my part.  I&#x27;ve just not seen these issues addressed, and figured you would be the crowd best able to do so.<p>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;signal-encrypted-messaging-features-mainstream&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wired.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;signal-encrypted-messaging-featu...</a><p>[2] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;private-contact-discovery&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;signal.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;private-contact-discovery&#x2F;</a><p>[3] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;intels-sgx-blown-wide-open-by-you-guessed-it-a-speculative-execution-attack&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arstechnica.com&#x2F;gadgets&#x2F;2018&#x2F;08&#x2F;intels-sgx-blown-wid...</a><p>[4] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plundervolt.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;plundervolt.com&#x2F;</a>