161–170 of 334 posts
I find this hardly surprising. Somehow the USA government is very, very good at convincing companies to spy on their users.
The key part is this, and it was apparently reported back in April 2016 with Facebook replying it's "expected behavior", it's not something a general attacker can do but it would enable WhatsApp/Facebook to read conversations: > WhatsApp has the ability to force the generation of new encryption keys for offline users, unbeknown to the sender and recipient of the messages, and to make the sender re-encrypt messages wi…
I happened to have the Security Notifications on for a while now. I see the message: "X's security code has changed." pretty often. Under what circumstances does a new pair of encryption keys get generated?
No matter what IM service you use: As long as they manage the public keys for their users, they will be vulnerable to exactly this problem. This isn't just WhatsApp. This applies to iMessage and Signal too. In all cases, we rely on the word of the service provider that they don't sneak additional public keys to encrypt for into the clients and in all cases we hear that doing so would cause a message dialog to appear,…
I've tried in the past to get friends to switch over to Telegram, but there are issues since they rolled their own encyption protocol.
I've looked into using Mumble for voice, it seems quite secure because you host it yourself, and it's open source.
There's also a good list from the EFF: https://www.eff.org/node/82654
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What about political dissidents trying to organize some event in a group where different people are brought in by others in a web of trust.
If A and B have already mutually validated each others' keys, and B and C have, then B can act as an intermediary to relay the key fingerprints.
I am flagging this article, as the headline and first few paragraphs are very misleading, based on my understanding from: https://tobi.rocks/2016/04/whats-app-retransmission-vulnerab... They make it sound like an intentional backdoor has been introduced to WhatsApp to facilitate monitoring. Rather, it seems like there's a weakness in the implementation, where if a message is undelivered, an attacker could trick the s…
oh, please.
Does anybody seriously still doubt that all the main US tech/communication products all have backdoors?
I remember receiving the downvote brigade[1], when Moxie himself said that I should trust WhatsApp without having the source code and the ability to put it on my device. We (even a "smart" community like HN) clearly do not have the ability to think critically about security, and even when our leaders are sincere -- and I really don't mean to suggest Moxie/Signal was complicit in this move -- we still rush to defend o…
I'd go further and say Moxie is complicit by way of negligence. It's unethical to assist in the implementation of your protocol when you can't guarantee its privacy protections will actually stand. Otherwise it's free PR for Facebook to tout "Snowden-approved crypto". I have no doubt Moxie acted in good faith and wanted to expand encryption to a large number of users, but this is just another example of why proprieta…
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Did you miss this from the article? > Boelter said: “[Some] might say that this vulnerability could only be abused to snoop on ‘single’ targeted messages, not entire conversations. This is not true if you consider that the WhatsApp server can just forward messages without sending the ‘message was received by recipient’ notification (or the double tick), which users might not notice. Using the retransmission vulnerabi…
It is just as easy to have the clients send a copy of all generated keys to a central server for storage, no need to bother with this re-transmission subterfuge at all. What you are seeing is not some vast conspiracy, it is a compromise made by some back-end engineer to get a front-end product manager off their ass without anyone thinking through a better UI option. "So if a user loses their phone you are telling me…
It's kind of like that other nonsense tech companies are doing these days, by supporting U2F auth, but then requiring you also set-up SMS auth in parallel, so that "if you lose your U2F key you can go back in with the SMS"
Yeah, except that completely eliminates the point of using a U2F key in the first place, since your security would be no better than when you're just using SMS auth.
Or we can go back to "security questions", which I think most agree now are just not worth it, despite the fact that they can help users "recover their passwords".
If end-to-end encrypted messages can be intercepted through this, then WhatsApp shouldn't be offering this feature. The downside is much greater than the upside.
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According to the article however, the notification is given after the messages are resent. There is nothing the user can seemingly do to prevent retransmission on a forced key change. This prevents further information from being sent, but in case of undelivered messages, they could be snooped on.
Sure, this could certainly leak some information, but it's hard to argue that this is a "backdoor".
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A legitimate criticism is that they make it hard for people who don't want to use play services to user their app. For the privacy of the messages themselves, google really cannot interfere, unlike WhatsApp/Facebook.
AFAIK, Play Services is controlled by Google and has system-level permissions, so it could easily access Signal messages post-decryption if Google wanted it to.
EDIT: of course the fewer attack vectors the better