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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-38551-3_11
Dated August 2023.
expired
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.
expired
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.
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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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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
Open source can make it easier to audit software, but we’re long past the point where we can’t audit unfree and/or closed source software. Open source is great and important, but the debate around open source regarding trust and security is often a sideshow.
If 1. all participating devices are sufficiently secure and will be sufficiently secure in the future, 2. no participating device backs up your conversations to the cloud or only does so in a sufficiently encrypted manner, and 3. no participating user leaks your information in any other way, then yes, the general expectation is that your WhatsApp chats with people are encrypted. Keep in mind that defaults, nudges, and people work against you in this long list of requirements.
Oh, and… more importantly… metadata. But that’s a separate issue. WhatsApp’s encryption claim could be entirely true, but still work against user privacy, simply because those conditions are almost never true …and also, again, meta data.
Users conscientious enough to consistently meet all of these requirements could simply use a platform deemed less hostile to user privacy, such as Matrix or Signal.
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.
It’s uses the Signal Encryption Protocol as far we know. So they shouldn’t be possible too, Signals Encryption Protocol is even quantum resistant.
Problem is that they can still compromise it. Simplest method would be to just take what you’ve typed into the UI and send it two times. One time to your communication partners and one time unencrypted / decryptable for themselves.
But even if they’re exclusively sending via Signal’s library and not tampering with it or anything, they can still instruct Signal’s library to add another member to a group chat. And that ‘member’ can be their server. It will be sent, fully end-to-end-encrypted, but to an end you don’t know about.
They only recently made it quantum resistant, so I don’t think that whatsapp is using that version
yowsup is an Open Source implementation of the WhatsApp protocol. So there is proper end-to-end encryption on the protocol level - that would only leave the possibility of having a backdoor in the “official” WhatsApp client, but none has been found so far. BTW, people do actually (try to) decompile the WhatsApp client (or the WhatsApp Web client which implements the same protocol and functionality) and look what it is doing.
For anyone really curious, it’s not too difficult to hook into the WhatsApp Web client with your web browsers Javascript debugger and see what messages are sent.
That repo was updated two years ago, everything could have happened within that time.
It still works (with a few minor updates).
I wouldn’t recommended using old software if you care about security
Maybe so, but in this case the point was that the protocol used by WhatsApp hasn’t changed in that time and it’s still what they describe in their security whitepaper. If you want to use that software as is or maybe reimplement it based on that is up to you.
The E2E keys are exchanged over Meta servers, right? Couldn’t they just store the keys and decrypt on the server?
Only public keys get exchanged via Meta’s servers, those keys don’t help you with trying to decrypt any messages (you need the corresponding private key to decrypt - and that private key stays on the device).
Sure, they could just do a man in the middle, but that can be detected by verifying the keys (once, via another channel).
Makes sense. It does leave the MitM option open as you said, but if they did something nefarious here, it would have long been seen in at least a couple of cases due to OOB verification.
