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WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

wired.com

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

#21

>And that’s true on any phone that runs the app, from iPhones to Android phones to Windows phones to old school Nokia flip phones. Woo! Props to the WhatsApp team for supporting these features for dumbphone users like me. Does anyone know if/how/where you can verify a users fingerprint?

At least on smartphones yes, you can (by tapping on persons name during chat, and then selecting "Encryption").

Re: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

#23
post #21

>And that’s true on any phone that runs the app, from iPhones to Android phones to Windows phones to old school Nokia flip phones. Woo! Props to the WhatsApp team for supporting these features for dumbphone users like me. Does anyone know if/how/where you can verify a users fingerprint?

At least on smartphones yes, you can (by tapping on persons name during chat, and then selecting "Encryption").

I meant on S40.

Re: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

#24
post #21

>And that’s true on any phone that runs the app, from iPhones to Android phones to Windows phones to old school Nokia flip phones. Woo! Props to the WhatsApp team for supporting these features for dumbphone users like me. Does anyone know if/how/where you can verify a users fingerprint?

At least on smartphones yes, you can (by tapping on persons name during chat, and then selecting "Encryption").

[deleted]

Re: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

#25
post #11

The article says: "With end-to-end encryption in place, not even WhatsApp’s employees can read the data that’s sent across its network." But according to the diagram: http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Whatsapp_Enc... ... A's message is encrypted with Whatsapp's public key, which means that Whatsapp's private key can (and has to) decrypt it on the server side to encrypt it in turn with B's public key. If…

Why are people downvoting this? While the "public key" is not "WhatsApp's" it is served from their server hence in theory they can provide you with any public key they want, decrypt the message, store it, and re-encrypt it with the "correct" private key and send it off to the user.

With PKI the ability of the user to verify that they received and used the correct public key is critical and while I have to admit that I haven't read that much about WhatsApp's E2EE setup I haven't seen anything that shows how this issue can be mitigated in a way that would be useful for most users.

Re: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

#26

My question is, how can this be verified?

They have released a whitepaper [1] where they go into details of how the encryption works, so using this knowledge in theory one should be able to verify that the encryption is legitimate.

[1] https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap...

Re: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

#27
post #19

>“The encryption genie is out of the bottle” ... > There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech. If anything, we’re bringing that back to individuals. I think on the contrary, the surveillance demon is out of the bottle. It's impossible to hide metadata (i…

delete your dupe to revive some karma

Re: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

#28
post #11

The article says: "With end-to-end encryption in place, not even WhatsApp’s employees can read the data that’s sent across its network." But according to the diagram: http://www.wired.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Whatsapp_Enc... ... A's message is encrypted with Whatsapp's public key, which means that Whatsapp's private key can (and has to) decrypt it on the server side to encrypt it in turn with B's public key. If…

Why are people downvoting this? While the "public key" is not "WhatsApp's" it is served from their server hence in theory they can provide you with any public key they want, decrypt the message, store it, and re-encrypt it with the "correct" private key and send it off to the user. With PKI the ability of the user to verify that they received and used the correct public key is critical and while I have to admit that…

That's true, but they provide means to verify the fingerprint of the other party, so you can verify that your app is encrypting messages using legitimate public key and that there's no MITM going on.

Re: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

#29
post #20

> The encryption genie is out of the bottle > There was a middle period where the government had a broad ability to surveil, but if you look at human history in total, people evolved and civilizations evolved with private conversations and private speech. If anything, we’re bringing that back to individuals. I think on the contrary, the surveillance demon is out of the bottle. It's too hard to hide metadata such as i…

There is no reason why we can't create an entire new computing paradigm that does respect our historic conventions around privacy though.

I gave a talk about such conversational languages [1] at ClojureD last month if you're interested...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD-Dtr9j0f4

Re: WhatsApp Just Switched on Encryption for a Billion People

#30
post #26

My question is, how can this be verified?

They have released a whitepaper [1] where they go into details of how the encryption works, so using this knowledge in theory one should be able to verify that the encryption is legitimate. [1] https://www.whatsapp.com/security/WhatsApp-Security-Whitepap...

Nice! Thank you
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