this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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The Signal messenger and protocol.

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Just a little post to make you aware that a recent update that allowed synchronized deletion of messages between devices (ex: deleting a message for yourself only on your computer will delete it on your phone as well) also applies to the feature to completely delete a conversation.

This previously didn’t happen and is a bit annoying as I just accidentally deleted a few conversations from both my phone and computer because I was used to deleting conversations on my computer (as they’re pretty much stored unencrypted and I don’t like it)

So sadly I thought this change wouldn’t affect this feature but it did, so that’s annoying, I just lost a ton of messages and media

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[–] byte1000@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I'm pretty sure that only media content is stored unencrypted, the text database should be encrypted.

[–] mranderson17@infosec.pub 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The SQLite database is encrypted, though there was a period of time where it wasn't I think which may persist if your DB is older, but the key is stored right next to it on the filesystem. Signal desktop doesn't use your keyring or any of the other available methods to unlock it's database which is why you don't have to enter anything when starting the application, and why you can move it between machines by simply copying the .config/Signal dir. So while they are "encrypted", it's effectively clear text if you have access to the directory the database is stored in.