A Formal Security Analysis of the Signal Messaging Protocol

TLDR

Signal is a new end‑to‑end encrypted messaging protocol adopted by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google Allo, featuring uncommon properties such as future secrecy enabled by ratcheting, yet has received little academic scrutiny. This work presents the first security analysis of Signal’s key agreement and double‑ratchet mechanisms as a multi‑stage key‑exchange protocol. We formalized the protocol from its implementation, defined a security model that captures the ratcheting key‑update structure, and proved that Signal’s core satisfies several standard security properties. Our analysis found no major design flaws, and we hope the formal model and proofs will serve as a foundation for future studies of this widely adopted protocol.

Abstract

Signal is a new security protocol and accompanying app that provides end-to-end encryption for instant messaging. The core protocol has recently been adopted by WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Google Allo among many others, the first two of these have at least 1 billion active users. Signal includes several uncommon security properties (such as "future secrecy" or "post-compromise security"), enabled by a novel technique called ratcheting in which session keys are updated with every message sent. Despite its importance and novelty, there has been little to no academic analysis of the Signal protocol. We conduct the first security analysis of Signal's key agreement and double ratchet as a multi-stage key exchange protocol. We extract from the implementation a formal description of the abstract protocol, and define a security model which can capture the "ratcheting" key update structure. We then prove the security of Signal's core in our model, demonstrating several standard security properties. We have found no major flaws in the design, and hope that our presentation and results can serve as a starting point for other analyses of this widely adopted protocol.