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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Signal Bypasses Government Censorship

December 22, 2016

One of my favorite applications for encrypted communications is Signal by Open Whisper Systems. It's a favorite of other security professionals and even used by Edward Snowden and security guru Bruce Schneier. Apparently, the encryption is really good and can't be cracked. Governments trying to intercept the Signal communications have given up trying to crack the code and just block the connections. That was the case recently, when the Egyptian government blocked access to the Signal messaging service. The folks at Signal are pretty smart. According to Engadget:

"Open Whisper Systems circumvents filtering systems with domain fronting, a technique that routes all messages through a popular domain name — in this case, Google. All Signal messages sent from an Egypt or UAE country code will look like a normal HTTPS request to the Google homepage."

Pretty clever.

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