After recently discovering a chat service that leaked user images, as well as video and audio recordings, the CyberNews research team decided to dig deeper into the security features of the largest messaging apps. Media researchers analyzed various aspects of 13 popular secure messaging apps, including Signal, Wickr Me, Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Wire, Viber, Cyber Dust, iMessage, Pryvate, Qtox, Session, and Briar to find that 11 of all 13 apps were secure by default. Rather than try to categorize these apps in any way, CyberNews focused on looking at encryption, transport, and overall app privacy. Overall, the researchers' results were mostly positive with all but two apps, Telegram and Messenger, offering security by default. Even then, Telegram and Messenger could easily be protected by changing user settings for each conversation.
Secure messaging apps
When it comes to secure messaging apps, most of the attention is usually focused on the most popular apps like Signal, Messenger, Viber, Telegram, and WhatsApp. However, CyberNews wants to expand its analysis to understand the broader scope of the secure messaging industry by considering less popular services like Session, Briar, Wickr Me, Wire, and Cyber Dust. Of these apps, Signal, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Session use the Signal protocol for end-to-end encryption. With end-to-end encryption, only the sender and recipient can see the messages; without it, the messaging application server located between the sender and the recipient can read the messages. An interesting finding from media research is the fact that Apple's iMessage only uses encryption over HTTPS. Therefore, messages sent via GSM to 2G and 3G devices are not encrypted. CyberNews also discovered that Briar and Qtox are the only secure messaging apps that use a peer-to-peer (P2P) transport mechanism where there is no server in the middle between the sender and receiver, allowing messages to go directly from a device. To the next one. If you use Facebook Messenger or Telegram to communicate with friends and family while on vacation, CyberNews recommends that you enable privacy and security settings for each app. However, you will need to do this conversation by conversation. To do this in Messenger, you'll need to press the "i" button in the upper right corner of an active conversation, then select "Go to secret conversation" to create a new end-to-end encrypted conversation. The process is similar on Telegram, where you'll need to select "Go to secret chat" in the app's settings. Interested users can read the full CyberNews report here to compare different aspects of today's most popular secure messaging apps.- We've also highlighted the best VPN services