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Comment by chc4 | Hacker News Reader

Signal is an end-to-end encrypted messaging app. People continue to breathlessly mentioning the lack of database encryption as a problem, but that never made it a real security issue: its job is not, and has never been, dissuading an attacker who has local access to one of the ends, especially because that is an incoherent security boundary (just like the people who were very upset about Signal using the system keyboard which is potentially backdoored - if your phone is compromised, of course someone will be be able to read your Signal messages).

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Database encryption isn't comparable to the keyboard drama. Protecting against malware in your keyboard can be done by using a different meyboard and is of course out of scope.

But if my phone gets taken and an exploit is used to get root access on it, I don't want the messages to be readable and there's nothing I can do about it. It's not like I can just use a different storage backend.

It's also a very simple solution - just let me set an encryption password. It's not an open-ended problem like protecting from malware running on the device when you're using it.

If someone has root access to your apparently unencrypted phone, then they can just launch the Signal app directly and it'll decrypt the database for them.

Which is to say this is an incoherent security boundary: you're not encrypting your phone's storage in a meaningful way, but planning to rely on entering a pin number every time you launch Signal to secure it? (Which in turn is also not secure because a pin is not secure without hardware able to enforce lock outs and tamper resistance...which in this scenario you just indicated have been bypassed).

Any modern Android is encrypted at rest, but if your phone is taken after first unlock, they get access to the plaintext storage. That's the attack vector.

A passphrase can be long, not just a short numeric PIN. It can be different from the phone unlock one. It could even be different for different chats.

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