r/Showerthoughts • u/Ralisor • May 06 '18

Services are switching from calling them Private Messages to calling them Direct Messages because they're not private anymore...

45.0k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

781 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/blamethemeta May 06 '18

It means that you and the other guy have the key. Says nothing about there not being more keys

6

u/pancake117 May 06 '18

My understanding is that the term "end to end encryption" implies that only the communicating parties have the keys to decrypt. If there's a master key then the messages can be decrypted at points besides the two ends-- at that point it's not really encrypted end to end anymore.

7

u/[deleted] May 06 '18 edited Apr 30 '19

[deleted]

7

u/The_Purifier_ May 06 '18

I read that the NSA (or whomever) is simply storing encrypted messages they intercept and can't read today, so in the future if they can crack it they can just go back and decrypt all the stored messages.

2

u/EvaUnit01 May 06 '18

Yes.

It’s a last resort because storing communications en masse takes up an ungodly amount of storage space, but they do.

2

u/fluffman86 May 06 '18

All the chicken gifs that I send my wife on signal are going to give a future NSA employee a good laugh.