WhatsApp banned on House staffers' devices

If you think WhatsApp leaves a lot of metadata on the table for analysis, try doing a Matrix chat. You get a plaintext view of which device used which key to send which message ID to which room/person. If the message is a reply, you get the message ID your new message is a reply to in plaintext as well.

Without even looking at things like HTTP headers, this is what the metadata an E2EE-encrypted message (with verified+cross-signed keys) looks like, with specific identifiers censored just in case:

    {
      "type": "m.room.encrypted",
      "sender": "@.......:jeroenhd.nl",
      "content": {
        "algorithm": "m.megolm.v1.aes-sha2",
        "ciphertext": "AwgAEqAC/..........",
        "device_id": "EDNM......",
        "sender_key": "+rKR.......",
        "session_id": "H3Oyob........",
        "m.relates_to": {
          "m.in_reply_to": {
            "event_id": "$5qFg........"
          }
        }
      },
      "origin_server_ts": 17507.......,
      "unsigned": {
        "membership": "join",
        "age": 127,
        "transaction_id": "m17507........."
      },
      "event_id": "$_KBk.......",
      "room_id": "!.........:jeroenhd.nl"
    }

Unlike on platforms like Whatsapp, these message envelopes are available to anyone with access to either a session token or the user's password. The E2EE keys require a bit of extra verification, but you don't need those to build a pretty solid who-talks-to-who-when network even in encrypted chatrooms.

I understand why they implemented some of the metadata this way, but the encryption-stapled-to-unencrypted-messaging approach just leaves a lot to be desired. Signal, on the other hand, leaks pretty much nothing.

People seem to be missing the point here.

I think it is fair to assume that the US intelligence apparatus has inside knowledge on how comprised or otherwise different platforms are. They are the experts in compromising apps so I'm going to take their word for it.

We learned from Snowden how this is achieved, have people forgotten all of that already?

So to recap, how I assume this is done. A combination of "legal" American routes to gain access to data and embedding agents in the actual organizations to do your technical bidding.

This is speculation but if I were compromising whatsapp I'd leave a bug in there that allowed me to compromise accounts on demand. Something like being able to reduce the randomness of the RNG for a particular account. Then I could just decrypt the messages super easy (cause I already know a range of RNG seeds that work) and it would look to everyone like it was encrypted.

So, who is the chief culprit for doing this, if I was a guessing man (and I am) I would probably say Israel has compromised WhatsApp and the US gov knows it and would like Israel not to know everything that Whitehouse staffers are saying.

Lack of complete e2ee is a feature for many large organizations—they still want everything encrypted, they just want a master key to be able to audit communications for compliance/investigations/insider threat identification. They also want strict control over who does what with the app, and where all of the associated data lives. Teams is just a totally different product from WhatsApp in that regard, with all sorts of functionality that will never exist in WhatsApp—tons of control over user identity and access management, integration with all sorts of other security tooling, etc.

Makes sense, there are lots of requirements for communication retention in financial institutions. If I recall the phone lines are permanently recorded on trading desks by regulators so if anything does happen they have all the info... it's why socializing in person is such a big part of being a trader.

E2EE is mostly useful for consumer applications, where you trust the endpoint (yourself), but not the intermediary servers (some megacorp that doesn't care about you).

The situation is entirely different when you are managing very large organizations.

In those situation, you don't necessarily need the need the data to be invisible to the intermediary servers, because you might either just be able to control them yourself, secure them with NDAs, etc. And if the server is controlled by you, then you might not even want the data to be invisible to yourself. But, your primary risks may be the compromise of endpoint devices, mistakes or leaks by your users, or a lack of controls over data exchange. Also, many organizations may need to provide records of their internal communications in order to comply with legal requirements.

You might be surprised to know that enterprise offerings of many apps that otherwise support E2EE, often have a way for administrators to intentionally turn those features off.