How Twitter may get this Signal feature for DMs – Times of India

Twitter has been reportedly planning to add end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for its direct messages (DMs) since 2018. Recently, the company’s new CEO has hinted that encrypted DMs will arrive soon for the social media platform. Now, Twitter seems to have started restoring the code that was written years ago to offer E2EE for the DMs sent from the micro-blogging site. To include this security feature, the code that is being used by the social media site has been reportedly spotted in the iOS app. The iOS code suggests that Twitter will use the same E2EE standard that is also used by the instant messaging service Signal.
Twitter to use Signal’s encryption standard for DMs
According to a report by 9to5Mac, reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong was able to discover references to the Signal protocol in the iOS Twitter app. These references hint at the company’s plans to use a similar E2EE standard used by the secure instant messaging app Signal.
Wong also mentioned having spotted E2EE references on Twitter’s Android app as well. However, these references didn’t point toward using Signal’s encryption protocol.

The code used for Signal’s E2EE is open-source and can be used by anyone. So, users can analyse the code to ensure its security and can also try to look for weaknesses (if any).
Another software engineer Brandon Carpenter claimed that he wrote the code (that Twitter is now planning to use) back in 2018 while he was working with Twitter. Currently, Twitter uses the standard form of encryption which is expected to change soon.
Carpenter also noted that Twitter didn’t deploy E2EE at that time because the company faced challenges to provide the same DM features that can be easily offered with the standard encryption protocol.
Difference between standard and E2E encryption
Nowadays, almost all messaging services use encryption. However, there are types of encryption that can be used for messaging platforms. Firstly, standard encryption uses a key which is held by the messaging service. This key allows the company’s officials with the required access to read any message.
Meanwhile, end-to-end (E2E) encryption is different as the encryption key is only available for the message participants. E2EE makes your messages more secure as it denies access to unencrypted content even to the messaging company.