Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

whispersystems.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 386 posts

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#91

Post by avn2109 »

stormbrew wrote: post #53
kuschku wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> deliberately picked to be possible to pronounce That only works in English, again.

It seems like there could be a lowest-common-denominator set of phonemes that such a system could be built on, with translations into symbol groups for different languages. As long as those symbol groups are relatable by two people who speak the same language, that might be sufficient?

>> "lowest-common-denominator set of phonemes"

They already spent a bunch of time and effort finding these phonemes to build Esperanto, right?

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#92

Post by tptacek »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #84
tptacek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment here is incoherent. I agree: source can easily lie. How does that make it the gold standard for verification? The reverse-engineering of the actual shipped binary (for instance, the ARM code lifted to LLVM) seems like a safer analysis target. But, what do I know.

I actually in agreement with what you are saying about viewing the shipped binary, but source is a must also. ideally it is a reproducible build to verify the source created the binary.

You keep saying "source is a must" but you have yet to explain why that is the case.

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#93

Post by zxexz »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #80
zxexz wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not necessarily true. I haven't spent much time analyzing it yet, but your assertion seems seems. Please correct me if I'm mistaken, but can't you verify end-to-end encryption without viewing the source of the program? They're using the Signal protocol, which has been well-vetted. What I've seen so far in Wireshark looks good, but I am not a crypto expert. I'm in the process of reading and trying to understand…

without the source, it is not verifiable. it could be making a copy and sending it in an encrypted side-channel for example to their overlords.

You can definitely verify the code without the source. It may often be much harder, but it is not un-verifiable. Please stop spreading misinformation like this.

With all the wonderful reverse-engingeering tools, dissassemblers, debuggers, etc. available, and the numerous massive communities that use them, it seems pretty out-there that you could seriously think such a thing...

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#94

Post by tptacek »

dest wrote: post #90
tptacek wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was true in the case of Skype (which was eventually reversed), but it is not true here.

Maybe it is feasible, but at the very least I would wait for someone to reverse engineer it and publicly publish its findings. I do not have the skills to do that. Moreover, if reverse engineering is so easy, why not open-source it from the beginning?

If you don't have the skills to do basic verification of a non-obfuscated binary, you don't have the skills to verify an encrypted messaging protocol implementation from source either: the latter task is harder than the former!

I think the misconception some people here have about the necessity of source code is born out of the idea that a cryptographic backdoor would look something like a mysterious HTTP POST of your key or plaintext to some random endpoint (that POST, by the way, would be trivial to spot in the binary; you wouldn't even need to read assembly).

But real cryptographic backdoors can be extremely difficult to spot. A cryptographic algorithm that uses signatures, for instance, can be fatally compromised by breaking signatures (see: TLS). An injected cryptographic flaw that breaks signatures can be as simple as biasing a single-digit number of bits in a nonce; a bias can be as subtle as generating one less byte of randomness than the protocol requires.

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#95

Post by jamesdwilson »

zxexz wrote: post #93
jamesdwilson wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

without the source, it is not verifiable. it could be making a copy and sending it in an encrypted side-channel for example to their overlords.

You can definitely verify the code without the source. It may often be much harder, but it is not un-verifiable. Please stop spreading misinformation like this. With all the wonderful reverse-engingeering tools, dissassemblers, debuggers, etc. available, and the numerous massive communities that use them, it seems pretty out-there that you could seriously think such a thing...

skype is encrypted and backdoored. how can you know the same isn't true of whatsapp?

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#96

Post by pfg »

pilif wrote: post #59

What the article fails to mention: 1) I would assume Facebook still gets unencrypted access to my address book for use with their shadow profiles 2) We have zero control over what key the client encrypts the messages for. Is it only the other peer's phone? Or is it for the peer's phone plus Facebook for analysis of the messages? Especially 2) is of some concern to me (against 1 I can't protect myself anyways because…

> From that perspective, I'm still inclined to trust apple's iMessage a bit more especially after recent events.

// edit: got my answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11432629

I'm curious, is that because of what they did in the FBI case, or for technical reasons? IIRC iMessage would allow Apple to add public keys which they (or the FBI/$ADVERSARY) control as a sort-of backdoor as well. I can't say that I've been keeping track of Facebook's position or history on this topic, so it might or might not be fair to say that Apple deserves more trust here, but on a technical level there's not much of a difference.

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#97

Post by davorb »

mike_hearn wrote: post #14

This is really excellent. A few thoughts: 1) They seem to have replaced TLS/SSL between client and server with "Noise Pipes". Based on a couple of minutes Googling this seems to be a brand new one-man protocol from Trevor Perrin (the same guy who did Axoltl on which Signal is based). At least, I'd never heard of it. I wonder if this is the first inkling of a post-TLS future? http://noiseprotocol.org/noise.html 2) It'…

> What's the next step?

Imho one thing that the Signal project suffers from -- and that a lot of open-source projects suffer from -- is poor documentation. They need document their protocol better, to make it easier for third parties to integrate with their system.

Signal still lacks a working desktop client (no, the one that you can use if you're running Chrome doesn't count), and I'm sure tons of people would be eager to do stuff like provide integration for Pidgin if only there was better documentation.

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#98

Post by jsmthrowaway »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #84
tptacek wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment here is incoherent. I agree: source can easily lie. How does that make it the gold standard for verification? The reverse-engineering of the actual shipped binary (for instance, the ARM code lifted to LLVM) seems like a safer analysis target. But, what do I know.

I actually in agreement with what you are saying about viewing the shipped binary, but source is a must also. ideally it is a reproducible build to verify the source created the binary.

You have made this point seven or eight times that I have seen and it is bordering on cultish repetition. It is definitely spam at the least. We heard you. You're wrong, you became personal in your wrongness and accused a guy who does security for a living of not understanding E2E (do you?), and it's probably time for you to take a break.

I implore you to do so. Post haste.

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#99

Post by humanrebar »

zxexz wrote: post #82
humanrebar wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was asking because I have a notification today in one of my chats saying that e2ee was enabled. I didn't see the same notification in any group chats. Outside of that notification, it's not clear to me when things are encrypted. Maybe the next step is a more obvious indicator.

Doesn't everyone in the chat have to have the new version of the app before it's all e2e?

I guess? Hence the indicator. It would be nice to know if someone switched phones and e2ee turned off, for example.

Re: WhatsApp's Signal Protocol integration is now complete

#100

Post by zxexz »

jamesdwilson wrote: post #95
zxexz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can definitely verify the code without the source. It may often be much harder, but it is not un-verifiable. Please stop spreading misinformation like this. With all the wonderful reverse-engingeering tools, dissassemblers, debuggers, etc. available, and the numerous massive communities that use them, it seems pretty out-there that you could seriously think such a thing...

skype is encrypted and backdoored. how can you know the same isn't true of whatsapp?

People have verified that Skype is NOT secure[0]. Also Skype has not claimed to use end to end encryption.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/scorecard-update-we-ca...

Post reply on HN