Interesting read. There was a mention of distribution throughout France eventually, possibly. Strictly from a security standpoint, it would be superior to confine distribution to ONLY French officials. Its tough to hack software that you don't have in your possession to inspect.
Matrix and Riot confirmed as the basis for France’s Secure Instant Messenger app https://matrix.org/blog/2018/04/26/...sis-for-frances-secure-instant-messenger-app/ Hackernews discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16933736
Oh, that's sort-of good news. Currently though afaik, there is no development effort into providing protection for metadata with Riot/Matrix. I also think that Matrix will encourage improved security medium latency message passing applications in marketplaces, which would bypass much of the security disaster that is the browser. Kind-of like EDI but end-to-end encrypted and ultimately with address hiding. Since the parsing of messages will be through an api interface to Matrix, and you can write your own schema and parsing routines, that could be way more secure at the client end than a browser, particularly since the rendering can be decoupled from the parser process much more cleanly than the HTML DOM (and all the rubbish larded on top of it).
Also, Signal wants your phone number as identity, and is only available on those highly secure and privacy-loving mobile operating systems Android and iOS. With their biometric two-factor authentication methods. Matrix is federated and has an api for writing whatever application you like to it on different platforms. The underlying crypto is the same and widely respected, so it's not really re-inventing the wheel.
French government releases in-house IM app to replace WhatsApp and Telegram use April 19, 2019 https://www.zdnet.com/article/frenc...-im-app-to-replace-whatsapp-and-telegram-use/
Hacker broke into super secure French Government’s Messaging App Tchap hours after release April 20, 2019 https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/84219/breaking-news/hacker-broke-tchap.html
India reportedly wants to build its own WhatsApp for government communications June 26, 2019 https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/26/india-government-inhouse-chat-app-whatsapp/
Inside the French government’s mission to develop an encrypted messaging platform November 27, 2020 https://tech.newstatesman.com/in-pa...on-to-develop-an-encrypted-messaging-platform
