For open source messengers, you can check whether they actually encrypt your messages and whether the server has access to your encryption keys but what about WhatsApp? Since it’s not open source, you can’t be sure that the encryption keys aren’t sent to the server, right? Has there been a case where a government was able to access WhatsApp chats without reading them from the phone itself?
Facebook owns what’s app and they can read any message on the service, they’ve also been known to give logs and messages to law enforcement agencies at request without warrants.
Why is it legal for them to advertise it as end-to-end encrypted then? I thought the main danger lies in WhatsApp insistence on backing up non-encrypted history to Google Drive/iCloud.
Of course, the existence of backdoors is usually not disclosed (duh), but can they actually read any message?
Why is it legal for them to advertise it as end-to-end encrypted then?
Because they are a multi-billion dollar company.
You can have end to end encryption over the wire and still have all of your shit harvested at the “endpoints”
It really sucks how a shit ton of money gives a company the ability to do anything they want and avoid legal consequences almost all of the time. It’s a corrupt society we live in.
EU usually frowns upon that though. Sure, the fines are so small that it’s negligible for Meta, but there should be some fines. But all I find via quick googling are this year’s sanctions over personal data processing in Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp. The nature of these data is not clear though.
I am not trying to say that WhatsApp is safe to use, mind you. I am pretty sure they will hand over all the info along with encryption keys at first government’s request (or any other highest bidder for that matter), but that’s only my perception of them as a company, with no hard proof at hand.
The EU has been trying to outlaw encryption for most of this year.
“The EU” isn’t one singular person or party or state or whatever. There are some people who are trying to outlaw it but that doesn’t mean that they’re the majority or that it’s even legal to do.
It’s not illegal because it is end to end encrypted when you send messages, but it’s not encrypted on your phone and they have access to that, not to mention, I imagine they have access to the keys used to encrypt the messages, so even if they backed it up encrypted they can still read the messages.
The point of implementing it is not to protect people from surveillance, but rather to make people think they’re protected so they’ll keep using the platform rather than moving to another service. Their actual claims about it amount to “If your on public Wi-Fi or something, people skimming that won’t be able to see your messages” which is absurd because they already couldn’t.
Admittedly, no law enforcement that they refuse to cooperate with will have access to the messages, but like, “law enforcement groups Facebook doesn’t cooperate with” is a very small list.
I believe this is down to what they define as being end to end encrypted.
It’s no secret that WhatsApp adopted Signal’s encryption protocol just before Meta acquired them, but since it’s all closed source we don’t know if they’ve changed anything since the announcement in 2016 that all forms of communications on WhatsApp are now encrypted and rolled out.
Within WhatsApp’s privacy policy, it’s important to note that they only mention end to end encryption when it comes to your messages. Everything else is apparently “fair game” for collection. Of note, the Usage and Log information point details all the metadata they collect on you automatically, including how you use the service; how long you use the service; your profile info; the groups you’re in; whether you’re online; and the last time you were online, to name a few things.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that technically they are end to end encrypted by definition, and whilst they’ve gone ahead and implemented things such as encrypted backups (that you must enable) to make it harder for them to read your message contents, they can still collect a lot of metadata on every user.
It’s no secret that WhatsApp adopted Signal’s encryption protocol just before Meta acquired them, but since it’s all closed source we don’t know if they’ve changed anything since the announcement in 2016 that all forms of communications on WhatsApp are now encrypted and rolled out.
There is an Open Source implementation of the WhatsApp protocol: yowsup
I’ve not seen this before. This is really neat! Thanks for sharing ❤️
And the metadata is enough to get convictions. A person was convicted back in 2019 or so based on the metadata of her whatsapp conversation with a reporter. Natalie something, I think.
It wouldn’t surprise me if WhatsApp’s model on this is what the UK government were thinking of with the Online Safety Bill when they tried to enforce a back door in encrypted messengers.
It’s incredible just how much more interesting metadata can be than the actual message contents.
Explaining this to people when they ask why I don’t use WhatsApp is pretty difficult though.
I wouldn’t feel comfortable if I found out that what I thought was just a casual walk down the street mindlessly chatting with a friend turned out to also involve a third party neither of us were aware of tracking all of our movements.
It’s very obvious to me that GBoard sends data directly to Google circumventing all encryption.
👆👆👆👆👆👆 Came looking for this one. Because somehow Joe Average ends up with keyboards having “added value” like Giphy (from Meta) integration and online spell checkers because local dictionaries are to oldskool.
This is just completely wrong. If you read past the misleading headline here:
https://nypost.com/2021/09/07/facebook-reads-and-shares-whatsapp-private-messages-report/
You’ll see that Facebook cannot, in fact, give logs to law enforcement. If you choose to report a message you’ve received and send it to Facebook, then obviously then they can read it.
Also, your claim in another comment that Facebook does not have private keys to decrypt your encrypted messages is just fantasy.
According to the declassified internal FBI document I just linked, they do have access to the content of messages from what’s app, without any formal legal request.
The NY post is a poor source and completely unreliable.
declassified internal FBI document I just linked
don’t see any such link
There’s no such link in their comment history either.
Probably not, but it’s impossible to verify. There’s a strong argument for open source when security really matters.
I think there is a strong argument for Foss for anything
You bet your ass they can. Since when has Facebook taken anybody’s privacy seriously? And you remember all the Snowden leaks? Like how AT&T has been a government apparatus for spying for decades? Or how about the way that the USA taps under sea cables to monitor data, causing China to build totally parallel backbone infrastructure
The better question is whether Signal, despite being open source, is actually secure. It’s very plausible that the govt has backdoors somewhere, for either encryption, the OS, the programming language, the app store, or some random dependency lib
The answer is yes, the US government spies on everything, and has a complete profile of everyone
Signal hasn’t been compromised. It has been reviewed and is continuing to be reviewed by tons of researchers and security personnel.
Its also important to note that its used internally by goverment organizations in the US so it has to be at least reasonably secure.
Don’t believe propaganda you read online.
Well, in my comment I describe quite a number of methods. It doesn’t matter how secure or reviewed signal is, if the feds have a keylogger at the OS or compiler level. It’s really unbelievable how much code is involved in day to day security
The keylogger and operating system (if you’re using Android) is open source as well. They can’t just put a keylogger in there.
Nah, the OS has proprietary overlays that vendors put in there. And it’s not like you’re reviewing and compiling your own software - you’re dependent on your provider to be honest with the software they actually installed. But factually you have no idea if the android phone you purchased has been modified. And Android itself is so huge that backdoors can be sneaky. We have already caught several instances of attempted backdoors in Linux - but there’s always the fear we didn’t find them all
If this all sounds way too paranoid, then review Snowden leaks
Time to bet my ass
Well you gotta be careful if it’s your only donkey but I’m still confident you’ll end up winning a second ass
They don’t have to attack the encryption, there are far easier ways. Compromising your phone then reading the notification contents for example. If a smallish company can do this (pegasus) imagine what the resources of the US intelligence complex can do.
The easiest way by far is to intimidate you to give up your phone password and hand over the messages.
XKCD for refference: https://xkcd.com/538/
Shouldn’t the phone disk be encrypted too?
Doesn’t matter if the phone is compromised while turned on.
Another thing to consider is that the US (and probably most 5 eyes countries) have agencies with a “store now and decrypt later” policy. They theoretically could be capturing certain types of traffic and storing it in the massive NSA fusion centers. If you come under suspicion at some later date and the quantum technology has advanced, you could be hosed. Now what’s the legality of storing “precrime material” without a warrant? I wouldn’t think it is legal but that doesn’t seem to stop the 3 letter agencies these days.
Everything I’ve ever heard about government cryptography from people close to me is that the government (FBI, military) is wildly far ahead of what’s available publicly. I wouldn’t count on anything you do on the Internet to be truly private.
That was at times of DES. Cryptography that is used today is proven to be complicated enough that it’s unbreakable unless the government got quantum computing working at sufficient skale.
Like others wrote, attacks will happen when the messages are received and decrypted.
Given enough time anything can be decrypted, so, yes. The actual question is if they would have any interest in doing so given the large investment of time and resources required when they can simply hit you with a wrench until you give them the password to your device or in more enlightened Countries, just buy the data directly form Meta. You don’t control the server so there is no assurance of any encryption being secure beyond your chat not being interesting enough to justify the attention.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-38551-3_11
Dated August 2023.
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Its a book of proceedings of a scientific conference, usually peer-reviewed. Springer publishes the proceedings but has nothing to do with the selection of the papers or their scientific quality… its just a service they provide, for a fee.
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Group chats are also end-to-end encrypted in WhatsApp (so any monitoring would need to be done in cooperation with one of the participants’ devices before encryption or after decryption)
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In a subpoena case in India, that turned out to be not true.
Source please.
WhatsApp admins hold keys to being able to do that under law pressure.
How do they get the keys?
They only guarantee it for 1-1 messages and statuses, and against “generic” actors for group chats…
Who is “they”?
Yeah… I see no reference to this anywhere… some stuff in 2021 about WhatsApp protesting privacy law changes in India and some stuff about the liability of Group Admins for things posted in groups. Nothing about broken encryption measures.
I can only assume they are referring to WhatsApp Group Admins, who are inherently part of the group, as opposed to WhatsApp company admins.
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If you did not enable end-to-end encryption for your WhatsApp backups on Google Drive, the US government could possibly compel Google to hand over your encrypted (but not end-to-end encrypted) backup, and compel Meta to hand over the decryption keys for the backup.
Details about how WhatsApp backup works: The Workings of WhatsApp’s Backups (and Why You Should Enable End-to-End Encrypted Backups).
I know that WhatsApp backups aren’t safe and I never turned them on
People got arrested for WhatsApp messages in my country so there is a backdoor built in no question
That’s mostly group chats and someone from the group showed the comments to the police.
Dunno
No. They cant decrypt your chats. They can however backdoor your device and see the pre or post delivery message. Its not hard for them to do. Technically or legally.
If they arent currently logging activity on your device then turning on self destruct messaging could mitigate their ability to spy on you. Unfortunately all your chat partners have to do it too.
this post has some good information.
tldr - you cant fully verify
The code is not open source, so it’s hard to verify how good the encryption is or if it has backdoors.
I’m not an expert in cryptography, but from my limited knowledge, the cryptographic keys used are very important. If Meta or the government can somehow know the decryption key to your messages or predict it, then they can see your messages.
But they most likely don’t need to decrypt it in transit. One of the vulnerabilities in this system is Google firebase, which delivers notifications to your phone when WhatsApp messages arrive. Ever noticed how those notifications include the message content and the sender? Google has access to this information, despite the encryption.
That’s just an example. Google has access to a lot on your phone.
Another thing to consider is message metadata. The content of your message is encrypted, but what about information like the destination of your message, its recipients, time sent and received, and frequency? I’d even argue this is more important than content in many situations. Sometimes, linking person A to person B tells me a lot about person A.
Ever noticed how those notifications include the message content and the sender? Google has access to this information, despite the encryption.
Not necessarily. I work on a messaging app, and we only use firebase to “wake up” the app. Initially the notification doesn’t display anything meaningful, but the app very quickly connects to the server (tells the app who it should connect with) and then the peer (to finally get the actual content). The notification is updated once we have the content. But it typically goes so fast that you only ever see the final version of the notification.
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