Signal Secure Backups

I already pay Apple for storage, please just back up my chats/media to iCloud.

This BS is why I completely stopped donating to the signal foundation.

The messages are mine, not theirs, and yet they refuse to allow me to handle them how I deem fit.

> The messages are mine, not theirs, and yet they refuse to allow me to handle them how I deem fit.

"They refuse to allow me" meaning "they don't add the features I want for free to the app they provide for free, so I complain".

The messages are yours, of course. But don't forget that you use their work for free. If you're not happy, go use the free work of someone else, I guess?

They are somewhat correct though, Signal has written code explicitly to prevent iOS users from including Signal data in Apple’s encrypted local and/or cloud backups.

Allowing encrypted backups was free for Signal, but they spent time and money to prevent it for iOS users.

Part of the code the wrote to prevent backups in question:

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-iOS/blob/5590f09c3643f12...

It would be interesting to have Signal's justification for that, but I can totally imagine that it is a security feature.

As in: they may not want their users to inadvertently share their Signal messages with Apple.

Lot's of people have requested justification in related Github issues there, but Signal has not given a clear answer. If there was a security problem with the encryption process I believe a CVE or similar would have been in order because it would affect millions of users.

I was not talking about a security flaw.

I was saying that maybe, Signal did not want to push their users to trust the Apple backup by default.

Signal is a nonprofit foundation, it's not like they are trying to squeeze their users with their own secure backup.

> I was saying that maybe, Signal did not want to push their users to trust the Apple backup by default.

The gap in understanding here is that Signal already trusts iOS by providing an app. It trusts it even more by providing notifications (with sender and content) that go through Apple’s systems. It integrates with CallKit to work with the Phone app. Putting iCloud alone in a separate bucket doesn’t make sense. They could’ve done this same backup with a 64 character recovery key and stored the data in iCloud. Signal made an intentional choice not to allow backups on iOS.

One can only hope that the point about supporting other backup endpoints/storage gets implemented sooner rather than having to wait several more years.