When messaging/journaling/etc apps say this, what does it actually mean, and why does it give people reassurance that their private info is safe?
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End to End encryption means that the transmission service can’t read the content of the message.
The way it works goes a little something like this:
Modern encryption algorithms work on two types of “keys”, Public and Privet, for this though you can think of them as a “Lock” and a “Key”, if I hand you a lock you don’t need any special equipment to put in on a box, but once you do that you can’t open it.
The nice part about this, is that you can make an arbitrarily large number of locks for anyone who asks for them, they can be reused by the people you send them to, and no matter how many you make it will still be (until a quantum computer gets big enough) just as secure.
The goal of its development being “anyone can close this, only I can open it”
The step by step of using one of these apps goes as follows:
* A and B start chatting on an app with E2E encryption
* The first step is that each of their devices create a set of Locks and Keys and send the Locks to the other
* A decided to sends the following message to B “Lets meet tonight for dinner”
* A’s app takes B’s Lock and encrypts the message and makes it look like this: `b’gAAAAABkJKWTY1u2sPwSGTUD0N69P8G5HrKJwRJmM0OnX9l4KJLpCmVOlNxLxPbExPw7XIQJRIhT5CC2gEpuReUq8A5bJlFph_QNmncg7tuJJItifUEMG-g=’` (actual encrypted version of text, I used Python’s Cryptography module)
* App then sends that over the internet to B’s device
* B’s device can then use B’s Key to take the gobbledegook and turn it back into the original text of “Lets meet tonight for dinner”
The big deal about if being “End to End Encrypted” is that anyone who was trying to listen into the conversation by intercepting and copying the messages will only have the encrypted versions which are indistinguishable from noise.
The current method for encryption involves 3 numbers: 2 very large primes and their product, the primes are the privet “unlocking” key and the product is the public “locking” one, this works because it is incredibly time consuming with modern computers to go from the product to the prime factors. Quantum computers are changing this but people are implementing new methods of encryption which will still hold up into the future.
Now there are some problems that can come up which I will quickly run through:
* Not all encryptions are the same, if they are using a weaker algorithm or shorter keys then it can be broken
* Some algorithms can be set up with a pre-defined 3rd key that will always work to decrypt every message, in this case the company can read everything anyway and if the key gets out then all the encryption is meaningless
* Current development of quantum computers means that in the not to distant future it will be possible to break the RSA encryption algorithm which has been widely used for decades and there are actors in the space who are simply gathering encrypted data and sitting on it until they can get their hands on the tools to break it open, as it doesn’t go bad.
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