What is Signal, the application involved in a safety violation of war plans?

Signal, a popular messaging application, entered the center of attention this week after reporting that several senior Trump administration officials had used the tool to carry out war planning, inadvertently including a journalist in the message group.

The application, which began in 2014 and has hundreds of millions of users, is popular among journalists, activists, privacy experts and politicians, anyone who wants to ensure their communications with encryption.

But the use of the application by government officials resulted in a violation of intelligence that took place outside the safe government channels that would normally be used for classified and highly sensitive war planning. The incident has raised questions about the security of Signal and why government officials were using it. (Federal officials cannot generally install a signal on their devices issued by the Government).

This is what you should know.

What is the signal used for?

The signal is an encrypted messaging application that is used to communicate safely. Falses from extreme to extreme, which means that what a user says is encrypted on their device and did not decipher until it reaches the recipient. This method protects the message of being intercepted and read by any person, including Internet service providers, computer pirates or the signal itself, while in transit.

Users can also establish signal messages to disappear after a certain period of time. Users who want their messages to disappear can turn on the function in the configuration for each of their individual chats.

Who possesses the signal?

The signal is owned by an independent non -profit organization in the United States called Foundation Signal. It is funded by donations from its users and subsidies.

The Foundation began in 2018 with a donation of $ 50 million by Brian Acton, WhatsApp co -founder, another messaging platform that was bought in 2014 by facebook. Mr. Acton left WhatsApp to begin the Signal Foundation after disputes with facebook, which is now known as the goal, about the plans to earn money with its messaging service.

Mr. Acton joined Moxie Marlinspike, a cryptographer who designed Signal's security system, to create the signal base. The Foundation is structured to prevent the signal from having an incentive to sell user data.

“There are so many great reasons to be a sign,” Marlinspike wrote, who resigned from the Board of the Foundation in 2022, wrote in a publication about x Monday. “Now, including the opportunity for the vice president of the United States of America to add it randomly to a group chat for the coordination of sensitive military operations. Do not sleep this time.”

Is the signal safe?

Yes. The signal is widely considered as the safer messaging application on the market, due to its encryption technology and other measures designed to ensure user data.

Its underlying encryption technology is open source, which means that the code becomes public and allows technologists outside the non -profit organization to examine it and identify failures. technology also has a license and used by other services, such as WhatsApp.

This encryption technology has been key when the signal has been an objective of foreign computer pirates. Russia has tried to monitor when the Ukrainians are using signal, and in February, Google researchers said that Russian computer pirates had tried to kidnap user signal accounts. While the second attack was effective, it worked cheating on users to add dishonest devices to their signal accounts, not breaking signal encryption.

“Phishing attacks against people who use popular applications and websites are a fact of life on the Internet,” said Jun Harada, a Signal spokesman. “Once we knew that the signal users were being attacked and how they were being attacked, we introduced additional safeguards and warnings in the application to help protect people from the fall of Phishing attacks.”

In the case of a safety violation, the signal is designed to retain as many user data as possible, so that the minimum information is exposed. Unlike other messaging services, the company does not store the contacts of users or other identification data that can indicate how a person used the service.

That does not mean that the signal is the ideal service to communicate war plans. If a user's device is compromised, their signal messages could be read, and the use of a communication system approved by the Government could prevent officials from including a journalist in a war planning discussion.

Is the signal safe to send text messages?

Yes, in general, although users must be careful to examine new contacts, as they will do on any other social platform.

And by adding people to their group chats, they may want to take an additional moment to make sure they have included the correct contacts.