171–180 of 386 posts
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Only if builds are fully reproducible, which is rarely true. Otherwise, the source can make it harder, by lying to you.
Then demand reproducible builds from software with security claims?
Question for me is still around iCloud backups. Per http://www.popsci.com/whatsapp-now-encrypts-all-messaging-fo... : > However, WhatsApp on iOS still backs up chat logs to iCloud, and despite any effort by Facebook, those could be given to a law enforcement agency. It's not known whether the backups are encrypted, but we've reached out to Open Whisper Systems and will update with any new information. Apple stores iM…
How does this compare with Telegram?
By default, Telegram stores a plaintext copy of every message you've ever sent or received on their servers. WhatsApp does end to end encryption using the Signal Protocol by default, and doesn't store anything server side.
- What if the government forces WhatsApp to write and push a targeted software update in order to compromise the end-to-end encryption (I'm of course thinking of the FBI vs Apple case)? Is there a way for the user to be notified?
- Does WhatsApp Auto Backup encrypt messages before sending them to Google Drive or iCloud?
- Would it be possible for WhatsApp Web to rely on backend servers storing an encrypted version of messages, instead of relying on a connection to the user's phone, and still be able to perform keyword search over the encrypted messages with something like github.com/strikeout/mylar?
The next step is some kind of noise injection into the metadata. There are almost certainly ways to look at who is chatting with who when. It'd be fantastic to automatically generate realistic-looking traffic to hide the normal stuff within. Plus, you'd be adding deniability to any communication you're having.
There's likely some pretty severe battery usage issues with it. If you offload the metadata fuzzing to a proxy server of some sort, then you're adding a vector to filter out that fuzz. It might be too big of a technical tradeoff to be worthwhile.
Does this mean that WhatsApp can talk to Signal Private Messenger app?
Actor is a messanger that seems to focus on federation and they want to use Singal Protocol as well. So maybe they will devlop software for that. However their is still the issue if Whatsapp would want to do that.
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What's the incentive of not using TLS?
About 6 round trips, which gives you about a 30s latency on EDGE networks. Doing a key exchange once, retaining it and then doing future communications with just 1 round trip is significantly faster.
Maybe not all of WhatsApp's platforms support the latest TLS improvements though, thus it's easier to roll their own?
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By default, Telegram stores a plaintext copy of every message you've ever sent or received on their servers. WhatsApp does end to end encryption using the Signal Protocol by default, and doesn't store anything server side.
Cool. So FB/WhatsApp can't even decrypt messages themselves?
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> They seem to have replaced TLS/SSL between client and server with "Noise Pipes". WhatsApp was already using a custom protocol instead of TLS. We worked with them to transition over to Noise Pipes, which has some advantages over what they were doing before. Also, we've renamed Axolotl to Signal Protocol: https://whispersystems.org/blog/signal-inside-and-out/
What's the incentive of not using TLS?
Noise starts from a clean state with modern knowledge of cryptography and modern cryptography. Much easier to understand and replicate, much harder to shoot yourself in the foot with.
TLS brings modularity and evolutivity, much needed in a protocol the scale of HTTP. In Whatsapp's case, Whatsapp controls both the server and the client; it is much easier to transition between versions because all bricks are under control. When you don't need what TLS brings anymore it makes sense to discard it.
As another example: Tarsnap (https://www.tarsnap.com/) uses spiped (https://www.tarsnap.com/spiped.html), a very simple yet powerful mechanism to build an encrypted channel. Its protocol and proof fit in ~100 lines (https://github.com/Tarsnap/spiped/blob/master/README). When you don't need all the jazz provided by TLS (and when you're lucky enough to be able to pre-share keys, which helps a lot) then a simple protocol is good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
By default, Telegram stores a plaintext copy of every message you've ever sent or received on their servers. WhatsApp does end to end encryption using the Signal Protocol by default, and doesn't store anything server side.
Don't forget that Telegram uses custom in house encryption and they say "trust us", it's good. Telegram encryption can't be verified.
Whatever the server, if the client encryption is reliable, data can't be read on the server side.