![]() 3 While the mantra “I have nothing to hide” is still widespread among Internet users, mass adoption of encryption has important sociotechnical consequences for those whose lives depend on strong cryptographic protocols, because of their risk-related profession or the political context in which they live. With the introduction of end-to-end encryption 2 in WhatsApp, the most popular instant messenger, billions of users started protecting their communications by default and on an everyday basis, often without realizing it. The analysis of how this protocol was intro- duced and swiftly adopted by various applications, and of subse- quent transformations of the encrypted messaging ecosystem, sheds light on how a particular period in the history of secure messaging has been marked by a “de facto standardisation.” What can we learn about existing modes of governance of encryption and the histories of traditional standardisation bodies, when ana- lysing the approach of “standardisation by running code” adopted by Signal? And finally, how does the Signal protocol challenge a “linear,” evolution-based vision of messaging history? Drawing from a three-year qualitative investigation of end-to-end encrypted messaging, from a perspective informed by science and technology studies (STS), we seek to unveil the ensemble of processes that make the Signal protocol a quasi-standard. While the Signal protocol is widely adopted and consid- ered as an improvement over previous ones, it remains officially unstandardised, even though there is an informal draft elaborated towards that goal. The most advanced and popular among recently-developed encryption protocols is currently the Signal protocol. Far from taking users as a homogeneous and undifferentiated mass, we distinguish between the low-risk users that appear in most usability studies (such as university students in the USA and Europe) and high-risk activist user-bases in countries such as Ukraine and Egypt where securing messages can be a matter of life or death.Īfter Edward Snowden’s revelations, encryption of online commu- nications at a large scale and in a usable manner has become a matter of public concern. We'll overview some common protocol design questions facing developers of secure messaging protocols and test the competing understandings of these questions using STS-inspired interviews with the designers of popular secure messaging protocols ranging from older protocols like PGP and XMPP+OTR to newer unstandardized protocols used in Signal and Briar. In the domain of secure messaging, the sometimes subtle choices made by protocol designers tend to elude the understanding of users, including high-risk activists. As secure messaging protocols face increasingly widespread deployment, differences between what developers " believe " about user needs and the actual needs of real-existing users could have an impact on the design of future technologies.
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