Earlier this month Twitter’s ‘Chief Twit’ Elon Musk said encrypted direct messages were coming, and now we’re seeing evidence how the company will achieve this.
According to researcher Jane Manchun Wong, she said on Saturday evening, “Twitter will adopt the Signal Protocol for Encrypted DMs. Seeing code references of the Signal Protocol inside Twitter’s iOS app.” Signal is a free and open source software that allows for encrypted communications.
Twitter will adopt the Signal Protocol for Encrypted DMs
Seeing code references of the Signal Protocol inside Twitter’s iOS app pic.twitter.com/uHKlf9kFVX
— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) November 26, 2022
Wong clarified later, “also seeing this Signal Protocol library being statically linked into Twitter iOS app,” when there were some questions about her discovery.
Back in April, Musk said, “Twitter DMs should have end to end encryption like Signal, so no one can spy on or hack your messages.”
“State-of-the-art end-to-end encryption (powered by the open source Signal Protocol) keeps your conversations secure. We can’t read your messages or listen to your calls, and no one else can either. Privacy isn’t an optional mode — it’s just the way that Signal works. Every message, every call, every time,” explains Signal’s website. The service offers users to send encrypted messages and media to one another and is available across all platforms.
Twitter has tried working on encrypting its direct messages in 2017, according to Platformer’s Zoë Schiffer. But the project was eventually shelved.
According to former Twitter employee Brandon Carpenter, one of the company’s former software engineers that worked on the iOS app, the screenshot of the code shared by Wong was what he “wrote four years ago.”
Oh look! Some code I wrote four years ago. https://t.co/Z4PcLLbrV8
— Brandon Carpenter (@bhcarpenter) November 27, 2022
Encrypted DMs would mean any messages sent would not be able to be read by Twitter itself or a third party, unlike today.
Musk continues to make changes at Twitter at a furious pace, with the next major changes coming to its revamped verification process that’s coming soon (again) in December.
