I don't see refenece in this article or any others, but how did prosecutors get access to SBF's Signal messages?
Was it simply a court order that he unlock his phone (and agreed), or a codefendant who flipped to the prosecution and handed over the thread?
None of the screenshots had self destruct timers, so I'm not sure how they were using signal… kinda looks like signal desktop
more of the screenshots arnt cropped, they do have disappearing message timers, but they are using signal desktop, which doesn't do local encryption. So those disappearing messages are still on disk floating around…
(Signal desktop AFAIK has a terrible security posture, not secure at all)
Signal desktop doesn't even have a PIN to unlock it. IIRC the reason was that if someone is already on your machine then you're screwed.
I just want it to stop someone like my son, who may have access to my computer legitimately, from seeing some of the NSFW messages me and my friends send each other.
Just make a separate user acct for the kid. That way your stuff is separate and you can also implement parental controls if needed.
Yeah, we have separate profiles, but sometimes I just let him use some software on mine, like a game, or whatever, and then I go and do something else. The use-case is there, along with encrypted messages, but people say things like what you said because they don't personally have that use-case.
I'd look at implementing it myself, but they wouldn't merge it, and I'm not going to maintain a fork indefinitely.
For your use case, running a VM on your desktop should be sufficient. The VM could have disc encryption. So when you're letting somebody else use your terminal, they can't access your interesting messages.
Hyper-V has this built in I believe, QEMU does it as well, UTM on Mac OS makes it pretty easy. But there's a thousand different ways to skin this cat
Most sensible way in my opinion would be for the Signal app to have a PIN and encryption on desktop, just like it already does on the mobile apps.
I agree, but Signal on mobile doesn't require destruct timers either.
Is there a way to clear messages from the disk other than by deleting the Signal Desktop app itself or is that sufficient?
Not really. Once data is written to disk it's more or less there forever. At least from a risk perspective.
If your disc is encrypted, you can change the disc encryption key, throw away the old key, then it doesn't matter that the data is there you no longer have the key so the date is lost.
Most people use full disc encryption, and they're unlikely to want to throw away all of their data just for signal.
Unless you're using a container to run signal, or a virtual machine, or qubes : with disc encryption, then anything signal writes to the hard disk is more or less there forever from a risk perspective.