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Interesting, and thanks! Normally DHKE is authenticated though with public key cryptography? The way I understand is DHKE establishes a secret... with someone but in order to ensure it was your intended party, not a hostile government, usually a public key signature exchange takes place.


That's correct, it's an authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange. I'm not sure why they don't show the actual public keys anywhere but I suppose it doesn't make a lot of sense for the general public and it'd only be confusing.

In fact, the cryptography is even more complicated: The Signal protocol uses a so-called double ratchet algorithm[0] which derives from the session/conversation keys a new ephemeral message key whenever possible (again using a DHKE). This has the added advantage of providing forward secrecy.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm




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