Twitter is reviving a project that would bring end-to-end encryption to its Direct Messaging system, after abandoning previous efforts in this area after prototyping an encrypted “secret conversations” feature in 2018.
End-to-end encryption (E2EE) will be used for direct messages (DMs) exchanged between users on the social media platform after it was sought-after and heavily requested by users in order to protect private communications from anyone sitting between the conversation parties or even legal requests.
It also ensures that messages are encrypted when they leave the sender and decrypted when they arrive at the recipient, but for it to work, the two parties must use a cryptographic key pair to encrypt and decrypt the contents of their messages.
According to independent researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who discovered the changes in Twitter’s code, it will be available in the most recent version of the Android app.
“This number was generated from your encryption keys from this conversation. If it matches the number in the recipient’s phone, end-to-end encryption is guaranteed,” reads one of the strings in the source code.
The sources for this piece include an article in BleepingComputer.