Let’s say the NSA has been collecting your gibberish for the past 10 years. It will then be able to collect all the gibberish (encrypted messages) that both you and the recipient are exchanging. Imagine the situation where the NSA secretly seize control of the messaging server. To put it simply, with E2EE, the messaging server receives and forwards gibberish for its users.

Your recipient can read your message because both of you have engaged in a cryptographic protocol to ensure that he/she has the decryption keys to read your message. Then the server forwards the encrypted message to your recipient. Once your encrypted message arrives at the messaging server, whoever controls the server still cannot read your message because it is encrypted. Then you send that encrypted message to the server with a layer of transport security. This means that before your message leaves your device/computer, it is encrypted with a key that only you and your recipient know. So, how do you protect your messages from the prying eyes of whoever controls the server? That requires end-to-end encryption. But once your messages arrive at the server safely, the server can read your messages. To put it simply, whoever looks at the traffic between you and your messaging server from the outside (e.g. Transport layer security ensures your messages are secured on the way to the messaging server and from the server to your recipient. Likewise, most messaging service providers have servers on the Internet for routing your messages to the correct recipient and holding messages temporarily if the recipient is not yet connected online.

Even traditional snail mail requires an intermediary, which is the postal service. Most of the time, messages don’t travel directly from the sender to the recipient. If you have to trust your life to keep your messages private, which one should you use?īefore we can delve further, there are a few concepts you need to understand: Transport Security It is a very disturbing fact that a lot of private and confidential information is transmitted insecurely by people every day, with very little regard for their privacy. Unfortunately, for many people, they are unwittingly sent and received in an insecure manner. Emails and messages are the lifeblood of your online activities.

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