Security News > 2022 > November > Twitter source code indicates end-to-end encrypted DMs are coming
Twitter is reportedly working on finally adding end-to-end encryption for direct messages exchanged between users on the social media platform.
Twitter had attempted to prototype an E2EE system back in 2018, naming it "Secret Conversation," but it never materialized as a finished product and was later abandoned.
Recent work on bringing E2EE on Twitter DMs was spotted by mobile researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who found new additions to the source code of Twitter for Android, mentioning "Encryption keys" on the platform.
If Twitter introduces E2EE on DMs, users will feel more comfortable about the security and privacy of their communications under even unfortunate circumstances like platform-impacting hacks.
In July 2020, Twitter admitted that hackers who breached employee accounts and accessed administration panels could read the DM inbox of 36 high-profile users, downloading the contents of seven of them.
If Twitter had E2EE at the time, all the hackers would have gotten access to would be unreadable ciphertext, lessening the impact on the compromised users.