Five Alternatives To Snapchat 94
Nerval's Lobster writes "Snapchat isn't having the best 2014: less than a week after a cyber-security collective revealed an exploit that could allow hackers to swipe users' personal data from the messaging service, a couple hackers reportedly went right ahead and stole 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers, posting them as a downloadable database. It's easy to see why Snapchat's become so popular: the idea of messages that vaporize within a few seconds of opening holds a lot of appeal to not only the excessively paranoid, but also anyone who simply wants to keep their online footprint to a minimum. But as several security experts are pointing out, the idea of 'disappearing messages' was never a foolproof one. 'If you took a photo of your phone while the risky image was on screen, or took a screenshot, or dumped your phone's graphics RAM, or used basic forensic data recovery techniques to retrieve the "deleted" files after viewing them, or fetched the image through a session-logging web proxy,' Phil Ducklin wrote in a Jan. 1 posting on the Naked Security Website, 'then you'd quickly have realised that Snapchat's promises of "disappearing images" were fanciful.' For those who no longer trust Snapchat, but want that same vaporizing-message functionality, some alternatives exist, including Silent Circle (which offers a messaging app, for a subscription fee, that forces messages to self-destruct after a set period of time) and Wickr (features military-grade encryption — AES256, ECDH521, RSA4096, TLS — and the app-builders claim they don't have the keys to decrypt; messages vaporize after a set time)."
Disappearing data can't work (Score:4, Insightful)
The summary presents Silent Circle's subscription service as an alternative that accomplishes what Snapchat doesn't, but that's crap. Nearly all of the listed ways of preserving Snapchat messages will work with Silent Circle... and anything else that tries to do the same thing. Oh, I have no doubt that the Silent Circle app is a lot better at protecting your data in transit, and I'm sure it reduces message access to key access, so once you can verify that the keys are gone, the contents are effectively gone, but those keys are still vulnerable to all sorts of device hacks. They have to be.
I have hopes that in the future we may be able to embed secure key management hardware in devices, which will make this kind of stuff a lot harder to defeat, but ultimately nothing will ever be able to make sure that digital data actually goes away. DRM -- which is what this is, just in a slightly different form and for a different purpose -- doesn't work, and can never work, not in an absolute sense.
This isn't to say that Snapchat's disappearing messages aren't good enough for many purposes, and that Silent Circle's implementation isn't adequate for even more (assuming the people you want to talk to also have it), but anyone who thinks that they can send digital photos of their genitals to their friends, confident that only the recipient will ever see them, is simply mistaken. And anyone who wants to use ephemeral messaging for any more important purpose is a fool.
Taking a picture of your phone (Score:4, Insightful)
None of the alternatives, no matter how technologically sophisticated (within the bounds of current smartphone technology) can protect against a picture of the screen being taken with a second device.