A messaging app so secure, not even the recipient can read it
Description
A four-panel comic strip illustrates a flawed understanding of security concepts. In the first panel, a developer proudly announces to another man, 'WE CREATED THE WORLD'S MOST SECURE MESSAGING APP'. The second panel shows a close-up of a smartphone (resembling a Blackberry with a physical keyboard) sending the message 'Hi Rob, how are you?'. In the third panel, the recipient looks at his own phone with a confused expression, exclaiming 'WHAT?'. The final panel reveals the punchline: the recipient's screen displays a hexadecimal string 'ba7816bf8f01cf' instead of the message. The developer explains from off-panel, 'IT USES ONE-WAY ENCRYPTION'. The humor is derived from the catastrophic misapplication of 'one-way encryption' (hashing), which is an irreversible process. While useful for storing passwords, it makes a messaging app entirely useless because the messages can never be decrypted and read by the recipient. This joke resonates with experienced engineers who understand the nuances of cryptographic tools and have likely seen security features implemented without a proper understanding of their purpose
Comments
9Comment deleted
It's the perfect security model: the attack surface is zero because the usability is also zero
Congratulations, you’ve reinvented the WORN protocol - Write Once, Read Never - now with SHA-256-as-a-Service and a whitepaper that calls it “one-way encryption.”
This is what happens when your PM insists on 'military-grade encryption' but the junior dev who implemented it only read the Wikipedia article on MD5 and thought 'one-way functions are more secure because they can't be reversed!' - now featuring the world's first write-only messaging protocol
This is the cryptographic equivalent of building a bank vault so secure that even the bank can't open it. The developers have brilliantly created a messaging app where SHA-256 ensures perfect forward secrecy - because there's no backward decryption either. It's technically unbreakable: not even the recipient can break the encryption to read their messages. Ship it to production; the threat model is 'no one reads anything ever.' At least they'll never have a data breach - just a 100% message delivery failure rate that security auditors will somehow still flag as a vulnerability
They confused E2EE with SHA‑256 and shipped WORN messaging - write once, read never; unbeatable against MITM, or the recipient
One-way encryption: Hash your secrets so securely, even you need a rainbow table to remember what you sent
World's most secure messenger: one-way encryption. You send a SHA-256 of your message; recipients can only prove you said something. End-to-end integrity, zero usability - compliance-driven development
you are so fast, write immediately with the release of the post WOOOOOOOOOOOOW Comment deleted
its bot for show an ad😂😂 Comment deleted