Are Secret Chats Truly Private?

Telegrams Secret Chat uses end-to-end encryption (E2EE) to protect the privacy of messages.

This encryption ensures that the content of a message can only be decrypted by the two parties involved in the chat, and that even the Telegram server cannot read the content.

Below is a step-by-step explanation of how a secret chat works:

🔹 Step 1: Creating a Private Chat Session

Bob initiates a session with Peter.

The Telegram client generates the session request and notifies Peter.

🔹 Step 2: Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

This is to securely share a symmetric encryption key between two devices for encrypting subsequent messages.

Bob's and Peter's clients each generate a Diffie-Hellman key pair (public and private).

Bob sends his public key to Peter, and Peter sends his public key to Bob.

Each side computes the Session Key from its private key and the other side's public key. Due to the mathematical nature of the Diffie-Hellman algorithm, the results are consistent.

This shared key is then used to encrypt the message.

🔹 Step 3: Verifying the Shared Key

Both parties generate a fingerprint from the shared key (e.g., using a hash algorithm).

Telegram displays this fingerprint as a QR code or string, and both users can manually verify that the fingerprints are identical to ensure that there are no man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM).

🔹 Step 4: End-to-end encrypted messaging

Bob symmetrically encrypts the message using a shared key (typically using an algorithm such as AES-256-CBC).

The encrypted message is transmitted to Peter through the Telegram server.

Peter receives the chat message and decrypts it with the shared key.

The decrypted message is visible only on Peter's device.

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