"The community note is wrong and Elon Musk is right. Signal's desktop apps encrypt local chat history with a key stored in plain text and made accessible to any process," tweeted Mysk in another thread.

"This leaves users vulnerable to exfiltration. The issue was reported in 2018, but it hasn't been addressed"

In response, Whittaker downplayed the flaw, stating that if an attacker has full access to your device, Signal cannot completely protect the data.

"The reported issues rely on an attacker already having full access to your device — either physically, through a malware compromise, or via a malicious application running on the same device," Whittaker tweeted.

"This is not something that Signal, or any other app, can fully protect against. Nor do we ever claim to."