#Signal messaging app how to
#Signal messaging app install
#Signal messaging app code
#Signal messaging app free

Then you’re asked to create a user name (usually just your real name) and you can add an image if you like.

#Signal messaging app code

Next, Signal asks you to input your phone number, and then a text message is sent to your phone with a confirmation code to verify the phone number is yours. Signal also asks for access your media and files so that you can send photos and files to your contacts. WhatsApp also uses hashing, while Telegram uploads your contacts but allows you to delete these records from its servers. You can read about how Signal handles your contacts on its help pages, but in short Signal says it doesn’t upload your actual contact names but rather “ hashes” a string of letters and numbers that it uses to match with its other users. Signal needs your contacts to see who among your friends uses Signal already, and the same goes for WhatsApp and Telegram. Next, when you open the app for the first time, it will ask for permission to access your contacts and media. Signal needs access to your contacts to work.

#Signal messaging app install

The first step is to download and install the app from Apple’s App Store or Google Play. We’ll use Signal to walk through the installation process, but the steps aren’t that different for both WhatsApp and Telegram.

There’s no playing around with the command line and managing your keys manually because the app handles all the heavy lifting in the background. That simplicity, however, means that you must trust the app to behave as it claims (though that’s true of all software). With modern messaging apps, you may still need to convince your friends and family to begin using them, but that’s the hardest part. Then you had the additional problem of finding or convincing other people to go through this rigmarole, using complementary encryption tools on their end.

#Signal messaging app how to

And that was before you started managing your private key and figuring out how to use the encryptions keys with your email client. In the past, using encryption required at least some familiarity with the command line, and it often took several tries to work properly. Telegram, meanwhile, uses a proprietary encryption scheme.Įven though encryption is far more complicated than it used to be, modern encryption apps are very easy to use. WhatsApp also uses Signal’s encryption protocol for its messaging. With so many permanent, temporary, and shared keys required to read a single message, it becomes much harder for a third party to read these messages without direct access to one of the user’s phones. On top of that, the temporary and permanent keys are combined (along with more fancy algorithms) to create additional shared secret keys between the two people communicating. The temporary keys are regenerated on a per-message basis to limit how much information would be exposed should the keys ever leak. Signal’s protocol, for example, uses a combination of permanent and temporary keys.

The encryption schemes for messaging apps are now much more advanced than the original public-private key scheme. You use your friend’s public key to encrypt a message, and when they receive the garbled text, they use their private key to unscramble it. Then when you respond to the encrypted message, the same thing happens in reverse. Once it’s garbled, the only way to read an encrypted message is to use the private key. By extension, the ability to communicate with others without being spied on is critical for sharing personal views and ideas (whatever the subject) with others.

#Signal messaging app free

Why use encrypted messaging?įew of us are spies, political activists, or journalists working on high-stakes stories, so why would we want to use encrypted messaging in the first place? Well, despite claims to the contrary, the right to keep your own private business completely private is foundational to a free society. WhatsApp users communicate with other WhatsApp users and the same goes for Signal users. For example, you cannot send a message from WhatsApp and receive it in Signal.

The other thing to note is that both sides of the transmission need to be using the same app. That is not the case with regular text messages, for example, or even regular email.Įncrypted communication can be anything digital such as an email, a text, an image, a voice call, or a video chat. Even the servers that transmit those messages have no ability to see what they actually say. Once encrypted, the message travels across the Internet, and only the person you’re sending the message to can unscramble it.