I love using Signal and will continue to make modest donations, but I would really appreciate an improvement in audio call quality. I still use Silent Circle for calls because it is so tiring to talk when the bitrate is low.
To be fair, that's a high bar. Our (SC) phone guys are masters at optimizing audio quality. I would be extremely surprised if any other app (encrypted or not) had significantly better audio quality than Silent Phone.
[1] https://wire.com/resource/Wire%20Privacy%20Whitepaper/downlo... [2] https://wire.com/resource/Wire%20Security%20Whitepaper/downl...
Can you talk more about "our guys" in respect to the fact that the CIA and NSA use the Blackphone? Should I, as a casual business person, be wondering that the handsets you supply to them are in some way compromised? I know that both the NSA and the CIA are interested in my phone conversations, which is why I ironically bought a Blackphone (for when I assume they are listening) and others which make their life harder (but I do accept that I do this more for the kicks of making them work for their intel)
tl:dr - is SC actually secure given that the company has been short on cash for a while and that the CIA and NSA equip their agents with the same phones. I don't mind talking because I have nothing to hide, but backdoor code is usually the case if you are selling 10k phone units to US LE.
Keep in mind that "an organization using a secure app" and "an organization wanting to spy on people" are pretty independent goals. I haven't poked around in the client source too much (although I have implemented some stuff for the Android client), but:
1) Nothing in the client seemed out of place. 2) I've seen every line of code running on the web backend and there's nothing untoward going on. 3) Given the culture, I think many of the high-level people would quit before they compromised the product. Especially Phil, who has been sued by the US government for exporting strong cryptography before.
I haven't read very much about it, but there seems to be concerns about opus leaking data about the call. I don't know how, but from android5.0 there is an opus encoder included that supports CBR mode.
I often get disconnected on Signal after 20 minutes or so on a voice call, but I suspect that's due to the other end being behind a VPN with awful latency.
WhatsApp is, I agree, very good quality for what it is, but I would never trust it or FB with anything but social/personal calls. Social Media platforms are for other people to hand over their lives to. Let them subsidize my detachment from their usage, and I thank them for it. I'm sure there will come a day where you can't use WA without a FB account, at which point it is dead to me and my social contacts will be the first to know about it via WA.
"WhatsApp calls are also end-to-end encrypted When a WhatsApp user initiates a call: 1 The initiator builds an encrypted session with the recipient (as outlined in Section Initiating Session Setup), if one does not already exist 2 The initiator generates a random 32-byte SRTp master secret 3 The initiator transmits an encrypted message to the recipient that signals an incoming call, and contains the SRTp master secret 4 If the responder answers the call, a SRTp encrypted call ensues"
From wikipedia:
"Signal voice calls are encrypted with SRTP and the ZRTP key-agreement protocol, which was developed by Phil Zimmermann.[1][57]"
So from where I'm reading they seem to be doing more or less the same thing when it comes to encrypting voice calls.
https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_(software)
Are you saying "maybe/maybe not"?
If they seem to be doing something that is "more or less" the same then my radar is triggered for them not actually declaring they are delivering totally encrypted (ie no backdoor tomfoolery) voice calls.
ZRTP makes negotiation possible, so a roll-out of opus should be possible without breaking older clients.
But no worries... there are a ton of moving parts in these protocols, and even though I've been working with them for a while, I still tend to forget details here and there, too.
edit - what did you upgrade to/from?