Is it well-known? From all I can see the algorithm was invented by Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin with no public relationship with the NSA. I see reason to be skeptic of that story, but I haven't seen any evidence whatsoever of the contrary.
Discussion
The crypto has been studied by hundreds if not thousands of professional cryptographers and implemented in many different applications by huge companies with lots at stake.
Look a bit deeper and you'll find Moxie sponsoring a surf holiday in Hawaii for cryptography experts to talk about the algorithm.
By coincidence he used CIA money for that trip and by coincidence are the headquarters of the NSA located there. A place that also by coincidence hosts a museum where they proudly display broken cryptography that took decades until adversaries knew about it.
A quite peculiar decision with quite a peculiar group of experts for an algorithm that almost immediately got adopted by facebook/whatsapp for their billion audience.
Even more peculiar is to observe that whatsapp rarely gets attacked by federal agencies for its "private" communications whereas Telegram is always the bad guy. Makes you wonder why Zuckerberg isn't afraid of landing in France and being arrested.
This is juicy stuff. Can you share more information?
Even with this “juicy gossip” factored in, why the fuck would the conclusion to that be to push Telegram, of all solutions? Truly backdoored garbage, full of spam and bots. Ultimately, Signal is the best mainstream option until and as when SimpleX or Nostr DMs with stronger privacy guarantees are ready to scale with products that appeal.
It isn't a conclusion, it is a comparison.
Signal is not the best mainstream option, because it was never really adopted by mainstream despite being promoted by western governments and left-wing groups, lest not forget it appears plenty even on holywood movies.
Still, Telegram has defacto been the best mainstream option without any of that. It is the non-acceptable option by western governments and yet used so often by the "mainstream" that they had to arrest the founder.
SimpleX is similar garbage to both signal and telegram. There is ZERO benefit in repeating the same mistakes of the past. SimpleX is a small russian company, that now received western funding. There is only ONE client implementation and ONE server provided by default by the same company for "free". In other words, they can easily disable any encryption for the "special" people as done for other options. You can't really verify and your messages aren't decrypted at their servers because you can't even guarantee they haven't stolen your private keys (tip, they are stored locally).
NOSTR is the future.
Hundreds of relays across the globe run by volunteers, dozen and dozens of client implementations and verifiable battle-proven cryptography that govs have a bad day trying to decrypt.
That is the reason why I'm here.
Agree re: Nostr but I feel the rest is just noise (I gave simplex as an example but feel it goes nowhere). WhatsApp uses Signal encryption. You may feel it is shit, and it might be, but to say it isn’t mainstream is incorrect.
If you read again, we were comparing signal to telegram.
Between those two, Telegram is ranked #3 in the west so it is a defacto mainstream. Whatsapp too, but that isn't really the same as signal.
Just call me when the US arrests Zuckerberg to complain about the privacy on his WhatsApp messengers.
I still find these arguments pointless. WhatsApp/Signal clear #1 by a wide margin, and represent a great level of encryption *for the average person*.
If you want to keep a secret, why do it online? Nerds just tie themselves up in knots over who has the biggest share of zero.
What is pointless is to consider that only something on top is mainstream.
With the same reasoning Twitter isn't mainstream nor Instagram.
You write stuff online privately because it is expensive and difficult to meet in person. This should be obvious, didn't they taught you that at the FBI?
Announcement where they admit sponsoring the whole thing under the pretense of surfing for a week in March 2013. Take a look at the agenda and try to guess how much they surfed: https://signal.org/blog/spring-break-of-code/
A description of the notable guests, some kept refusing to admit being there until completely exposed: https://streetwiseprofessor.com/be-there-aloha/
If you observe, that agency had just opened up their business there one year earlier to focus on "signal intelligence": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Cryptologic_Center
And then the "signal" algorithm was oficially announced to public a few months later that year.