Dutch and French authorities have cracked another encrypted communication service that criminals allegedly used to communicate with each other. The service, named Matrix, was the successor to previously cracked services such as ANOM, Sky ECC, and EncroChat. Police were able to intercept over 2.3 million messages and were able to read along with conversations for months.
Why are these apps getting hacked? Wouldn’t just RSA 2048 be enough?
RSA doesn’t scale, so if the message is large then RSA becomes unwieldy. So most encryption methods that make use of RSA actually encrypt the data with a symmetric algorithm, and then just encrypt the key for the symmetric data using the RSA key.
But there is still way way way too many ways to implement crypto wrong, which can completely compromise the security of it.
Encryption is easy, key exchange is not
The real matrix’s key exchange is pretty headacheless, is there any downsides to it?
Encryption is really really hard, and avoiding some form of sidechannel attack is much much harder.
Sure key exchange also isn’t trivial, but I would say that key exchange is significantly easier. Care to elaborate?
Encryption is trivial. Getting a reliable keystream is not.
It all depends on the framing 😁
Probably an implementation issue. Make a small error there, like storing parts of a key in memory or something like that and you’ve compromised security.