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?
- megopie ( @megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 50•1 year ago
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.
- Frogodendron ( @Frogodendron@beehaw.org ) 13•1 year ago
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?
- megopie ( @megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 13•1 year ago
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.
- cjf ( @cjf@feddit.uk ) English10•1 year ago
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.
- cmeerw ( @cmeerw@programming.dev ) English6•1 year ago
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
- cjf ( @cjf@feddit.uk ) English2•1 year ago
I’ve not seen this before. This is really neat! Thanks for sharing ❤️
- SheDiceToday ( @SheDiceToday@eslemmy.es ) 3•1 year ago
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.
- cjf ( @cjf@feddit.uk ) English2•1 year ago
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.
- nakal ( @nakal@kbin.social ) 3•1 year ago
It’s very obvious to me that GBoard sends data directly to Google circumventing all encryption.
- Joël de Bruijn ( @joeldebruijn@lemmy.ml ) 3•1 year ago
👆👆👆👆👆👆 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.
- Dienervent ( @Dienervent@kbin.social ) 1•1 year ago
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.
- megopie ( @megopie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ) 14•1 year ago
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.
- cmeerw ( @cmeerw@programming.dev ) English3•1 year ago
declassified internal FBI document I just linked
don’t see any such link
- Claidheamh ( @Claidheamh@slrpnk.net ) 3•1 year ago
There’s no such link in their comment history either.
- TigrisMorte ( @TigrisMorte@kbin.social ) 14•1 year ago
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.
- maxbossing ( @maxbossing@feddit.de ) 4•1 year ago
- crispy_kilt ( @crispy_kilt@feddit.de ) 13•1 year ago
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.
- johnyrocket ( @johnyrocket@feddit.ch ) 5•1 year ago
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?
- crispy_kilt ( @crispy_kilt@feddit.de ) 3•1 year ago
Doesn’t matter if the phone is compromised while turned on.
- mctoasterson ( @mctoasterson@reddthat.com ) 12•1 year ago
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.
- Cyclohexane ( @cyclohexane@lemmy.ml ) 9•1 year ago
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.
- kyle ( @kyle@lemm.ee ) 8•1 year ago
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.
- trailing9 ( @trailing9@lemmy.ml ) 7•1 year ago
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.
- stifle867 ( @stifle867@programming.dev ) 7•1 year ago
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-38551-3_11
Dated August 2023.
- 7heo ( @7heo@lemmy.ml ) 2•1 year ago
expired
People got arrested for WhatsApp messages in my country so there is a backdoor built in no question
- Samsy ( @Samsy@lemmy.ml ) 10•1 year ago
That’s mostly group chats and someone from the group showed the comments to the police.
Dunno
- citytree ( @citytree@lemmy.ml ) 7•1 year ago
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
- cmeerw ( @cmeerw@programming.dev ) English5•1 year ago
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.
- Zerush ( @Zerush@lemmy.ml ) 5•1 year ago
Governments, if they want, can decrypt any chat, not just Whatscrap. But it makes a difference if a chat, especially this Zuckerbot shit, directly opens a Backdoor to governments, to give them access, or if they have to bother hacking the chats themselves, which due to its cost and time, is only done with a court order.
- cmeerw ( @cmeerw@programming.dev ) English8•1 year ago
Governments, if they want, can decrypt any chat
Any source for that claim?
- HeckGazer ( @HeckGazer@programming.dev ) 3•1 year ago
Relevant xkcd as always https://xkcd.com/538/
- fl42v ( @fl42v@lemmy.ml ) 1•1 year ago
I mean, it’s possible given their resources… It just takes long enough to be unfeasible. Also, in special circumstances they can Pegasus your phone and obtain the info without decrypting… Not like you’re not screwed anyways when it comes to such drastic measures.
- Possibly linux ( @possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip ) English4•1 year ago
It is impossible to say. If you are that concerned you should use something else
- Pantherina ( @Pantherina@feddit.de ) 3•1 year ago
Ask Meta. Its not Open source, its all “trust me bro its encrypted with some encryption”