Abstract
Messaging applications are now adopting the concept of end to end encryption. Signal uses the Signal Protocol which has no known vulnerabilities for its end to end encryption. The protocol was explained in this work and possibilities of improvements were explored. It was discovered that the protocol implementation uses the SHA-512 hash, AES in CBC mode for encryption and HMAC for authentication. These Cryptographic Primitives were replaced with more efficient alternatives, Blake2, Chacha20 and Poly1305 respectively. An application was created to test the running time of the proposed cryptographic primitives against the existing one. From the results, Blake2b performs better than SHA-512 when hashing keys, short text, and 1.4 MB file. Similarly, Chacha20/Poly1305 performs better than AES/CBC/HMAC-sha256 in both encrypting and decrypting short text as well as 1.4 MB file. The proposed changes were implemented in the Signal Application. Automatic test in the Signal application was used to ensure that changes made to the code did not cause any logic errors. To further test the application, it was installed on another phone and messages were sent. The security code was also verified. . Keywords: Signal, Blake2, Chacha20, Poly1305
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