The developers of the open messaging app Signal, focused on providing secure communications using end-to-end encryption to maintain message privacy, have implemented the ability to hide the phone number linked to the account, allowing for the use of a separate identifier name instead. Optional settings to hide the phone number from other users and to prevent user identification by phone number during searches will appear in the next release, Signal 7.0, which is currently in beta testing (Android, Desktop).
To add a user without a phone number in the new version, a linking feature via QR code or a special link will be introduced. Users will also be given the option to generate a unique user identifier name for their account, which can be used instead of a phone number for searching and adding users to the contact book (the identifier name does not overlap with the name chosen for display in chats).
The identifier name can be used to connect to Signal, but registering an account still requires providing a phone number. To protect against phone number identification by the identifier name on the infrastructure side of Signal, the identifier is stored not in plain text, but in the form of a hash created using the ristretto255 algorithm.
Source: opennet.ru
