👓 Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal | Signal

Read Technology preview: Private contact discovery for Signal by moxie0 (Signal)

At Signal, we’ve been thinking about the difficulty of private contact discovery for a long time. We’ve been working on strategies to improve our current design, and today we’ve published a new private contact discovery service. Using this service, Signal clients will be able to efficiently and scalably determine whether the contacts in their address book are Signal users without revealing the contacts in their address book to the Signal service.

There’s a lot of work involved here, but this is an intriguing proposition for doing contact discovery in social media while maintaining privacy. I can’t wait to see which silos follow suit, but I’m even more curious if any adventurous IndieWeb creators will travel down this road?

h/t cryptographer Matthew Green

Private contact discovery for Signal. Make no mistake: what Moxie is doing here is going to revolutionize messaging.
— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 26, 2017

In short: your contact list will no longer be available to Signal servers. If you trust Intel SGX this wipes out a load of info leakage.

— Matthew Green (@matthew_d_green) September 26, 2017