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from the tried-to-search-on-'Signal'-but-got-lots-of-noise dept.
Approximately two weeks ago, Open Whisper Systems announced the merger of two of its Android apps, Redphone (secure calling) and TextSecure (encrypted messaging) into one: Signal for Android. This is a counterpart to Signal for iOS, created by the same team. A Chrome extension is forthcoming.
Signal has been getting a lot of love from the security community (Snowden, Schneier, etc) specifically for it's user-friendliness --- something that has prevented the adoption of other crypto software.
The encrypted messaging algorithm seems to be a version of OTR modified for asynchronous mobile environments. Some version of this has been implemented in CyanogenMod as WhisperPush and WhatsApp.
Their blog has a lot of nerdy crypto detail for those interested. For example: deniability, forward secrecy, calling network.
All of their code is open source and funded by donations. Donations are also possible using bitcoin. Accepted pull requests get a payout using another of their projects, Bithub (code).
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Saturday November 21 2015, @12:11AM
It should be possible to make it use a customizable range of UDP ports.
It should be possible to make it use a single, randomly selected by the user, negotiable UDP port. Like BitTorrent, for example.
Reliance upon a fixed TCP port 31337 will make this connection very easy to detect and block at any router. The TCP port number should be also negotiable. If the software offers random TCP and UDP port numbers for the user to adopt and then open at their router, the overall picture will be random enough, hard to detect and hard to block.