How Group Encrypted Messaging Actually Works

Adding a third person to an encrypted conversation seems like it should be simple. It isn't. The cryptographic properties that make 1:1 messaging secure — forward secrecy, post-compromise security, deniability — become significantly harder to preserve as group size grows. When Signal introduced group chats, they faced a problem that doesn't exist in 1:1 messaging: how do you efficiently encrypt a single message for many recipients while preserving strong security guarantees? The naive answer — e