Comment by I_am_tiberius
Comment by I_am_tiberius 4 days ago
> "WhatsApp provides default end-to-end encryption for over 3 billion people".
Wasn't there news lately that they can still read your messages somehow?
Comment by I_am_tiberius 4 days ago
> "WhatsApp provides default end-to-end encryption for over 3 billion people".
Wasn't there news lately that they can still read your messages somehow?
I don't trust un-auditable client applications...
If you want to assure me your e2e is secure, there must be at least two clients implemented by different people, with at least one of them opensource.
Whatsapp used to have this, but lately they have cracked down on third party clients.
> Whatsapp used to have this, but lately they have cracked down on third party clients.
Blame spammers on that. The amount of scammers and spammers on Whatsapp is unreal.
If there is a 2nd opensource client written by someone else, you would hope they would raise the alarm when asked to implement "feature flag 437 means send all the crypto keys to the server".
Every encryption is end to end if you're not picky about the ends, or metadata.
Do you trust facebook (excuse me, meta) to not snoop on your messages, and to not share them with the "intelligence" agencies ?
This is not true. The IETF draft is explicit that E2EE means that the message cannot be read by any party other than the sender and the intended receiver. When companies like Meta claim they support E2EE, this is what they claim. There are no tricky semantics or legalese at play here.
Speaking of Zoom and encryption, its crazy that they bought Keybase (I think they basically said it was largely an acquihire) years ago, and have neither shut it down as everyone thought, nor materially changed it in any way. Unless they changed something it even gives 200GB cloud storage (KBFS) iirc.
It's not entirely accurate to say "any party other than the sender and the intended receiver," since the messaging app running on the user's device can read the messages. Something like "any third party (other than the app vendor)" would be more accurate. Without actually analyze app behavior, it comes down to trusting that the vendor doesn't do anything nefarious.
One could imagine a design where even the app vendor is untrusted... You would send an encrypted chunk direct to the GPU, which would then decrypt and render the message text in some secure environment onto the screen.
Neither the OS nor the application would know the contents of your message beyond "it's 500x700 pixels".
Similar things are done for DRM video, and widevine level 1 or 2 haven't seen many breaches despite running on a wide array of hardware open to physical attack.
I think the draft covers this well: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-knodel-e2ee-definition...
As far as I remember, Google does the final signing of the APK, which is eventually the signature verified by the OS to verify if an update is valid or not.
So Google can, if ordered or willing to help, create a new release track (e.g. experimental-do-not-deleted) and add specific e-mails to that track with the "improved" version.
Nobody would be able to see that in real world, and you know what, if WhatsApp themselves are ordered, they can also create their own "test" track, it's just less covert but it would technically be working.
In all cases, Google and Apple have to respect US laws, and the laws of earning money too.
If you do not cooperative with intelligence / police services of your country, only bad things can happen.
> When companies like Meta claim they support E2EE, this is what they claim.
Well, that statement can only resolve to true.
These requests of data collection are perfectly legal. FBI DITU gives an order: give me all chats from *@banana.com and they receive banana.com.
From there, two choices from the perspective of a tech provider:
a) You accept. You get paid.
You can always claim you had been coerced / are a victim, and that everything has been done by the law.
You take the risk to lose over 250K per day (!) in fines, some other court scandals that will come to you, some shady private stuff (what if we learn about your secret jacuzzi ?), harassement of the team, be publicly shamed that you supported terrorists who caused actual death of Americans, etc.
In addition, nobody will know that you are the privacy hero and you are not even sure that the data is not exfiltrated another way.
Yes, we looked carefully and decided we won't enjoy losing 100M USD and go to jail.
The trick is that the identifier / wildcard can be very vague and wide. Or there can be multiple of them, each of them are narrow, but put one of top of the other they are super wide.
> Do you trust facebook (excuse me, meta) to not snoop on your messages
No, but I trust some nosy German guy at TU Whatever to spend hours poking at the assembly, find that hidden flag and proudly present it at 40C3.
With enough eyeballs, all source is open (and AI will give us far more eyeballs than we have any idea what to do with).
Sure, you can have different builds distributed to different people, but the NSA can also just do that with Signal, Signal being open source makes it that much easier. FDroid mitigates this somewhat, but it's not like the NSA can't get a fake TLS certificate for their domain and MITM your communications.
WhatsApp could exfiltrate messages at the ends. But I assume the trick lies in the word "default". Didn't Skype also default to end-to-end encryption, unless there was a server flag that disabled it for that specific user (I might be fuzzy on the details)