DENVER — The recent Signal chat leak has caused some to criticize the encrypted messaging app itself. According to two Denver experts, Signal is not to blame for the leak.
Nathan Evans is a teaching associate professor and faculty director for cybersecurity programs at the Richie School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Denver. He has worked in the cybersecurity industry for nearly 20 years and said Signal is well-respected in that community.
“It's created by a very well-respected cybersecurity researcher, and that brings a lot to the game,” said Evans. “If somebody on the street was going to say, ‘What should I use for encrypted messaging?’ I would probably say Signal's your best bet.”
Evans believes the data leak was due to human error.
“It's not that Signal was compromised or that Signal has security issues,” he said. “It's just that people were using something when they weren't supposed to, and it was really just a mistake of giving somebody access to the group messages that wasn't supposed to have access to it.”
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Democrats have pointed out that Signal is not approved for sensitive military intelligence, but the Trump administration has argued that those conversations did not contain sensitive information. Most people do believe, however, that The Atlantic journalist should not have been part of the group chat in the first place.
Tanner Haas is a 3-time tech startup founder and three-time author who lives in Denver. His latest pursuit is as founder and CEO of Freedom Chat, a new encryption messaging app that launches in April. He agrees that Signal is not to blame for the government leaks.
“It has nothing to do with their encryption,” said Haas. “The encryption is sound. The encryption is there. I think what happened is unfortunate in many ways and preventable in many ways."
Freedom Chat will be available for personal and business use. The app will have zero commercial use of user data, prevent screenshots and screen recordings, and prevent media from being saved. Users can edit messages, unsend them, and set specific messages to delete after a given amount of time. No messages will be stored on Freedom Chat’s servers.
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Haas is working to see if Freedom Chat could work with the government in the future as an approved encryption app for sensitive or top-secret information. As of now, they have the infrastructure in place for an on-premises version of the app. That means a company, or the government, could store information on their own private servers. Freedom Chat would be used just for message encryption purposes.
Haas said Freedom Chat is adding a new feature following the Signal leak.
“If you and I are in a group chat, and we have 4 other individuals, and we designate it as a top secret chat, if you want to add somebody to the group chat, it’s going to require all of the other group members to approve," said Haas.
The feature aims to prevent someone from accidentally being added to a group chat.
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