The biggest security issue on WhatsApp are the backups, especially the cloud backups not the protocol and this so called "backdoor" itself. Pictures not encrypted on backups, encryption keys of backups stored on WhatsApp side which might or might not (???) have access to your cloud backups on Google Drive and iCloud. If a government (USA?) gets access to one of your or your friends backups and the encryption key it can see all of the conversation. This is for me the weakest point of WhatsApp.
WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
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Re: WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Signal is bad as explained previously, it requires Google on your phone to even work. If you think Google is more trustworthy than Facebook, sure go ahead and just use Hangouts or whatever." Every time Signal comes up on HN people make this point (Signal is bad) as if it is true. And every time it is exposed as bs.
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.
There are certainly people who want to use Signal without Google services.
I don't know how legitimate a complaint it is since Moxie et al have said that they would accept a well written pull request which provides similar functionality. But this just hasn't been forthcoming.
What I dislike about Signal mentions on HN is that aggressive posters conflate a number of different issues people have with Signal - lack of federation, reliance on Google push notifications, lack of SMS support, etc - and somehow lump them in together.
[Just to be clear - I am not saying you are doing this].
Re: WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
#53No 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 don't think people switch phones often enough for the warnings to be a nuisance or be ignored.
I agree that a lot of people would be very confused when they see the error, though, and while it's easy enough to explain even in layman's terms, I don't think it would help.
I think that's it's totally fair to complain about WhatsApp, since the issue mentioned is separate from the more general problem you describe; they could easily have done it the way Signal does, and I suspect they opted to do it the way the do it for the same reason they don't have the security notifications on -- they don't want to deal with the confusion.
Re: WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
#54From the outset I've always expected that a backdoor was present in Whatsapp. In fact, I'd be surprised if they hadn't granted themselves some special capabilities with regards to the content of the communications. Touting their end-to-end encryption has enticed many people to trust the product, sometimes with strong conviction, while giving themselves a monopoly on access to communication perceived as secure by the…
The fact that you have a PhD in cryptography doesn't necessarily mean you know how to write secure code. Especially C code. Lot of people hated OpenSSL quality long before Heartbleed, but it took that vuln for people to actually realize how bad it is. I can imagine a good, secure SSL library being written by somebody without a PhD, in a safer language.
I'm not sure that security is fully correlated with the degrees held by developers. It seems to have more to do with their motives. WhatsApp
is owned by Facebook, which is wholly motivated by profit and the aggrandizement of Zuckerberg, not by providing secure code.
What's most interesting to me is that for all the people who complain that C is insecure, I don't see any great, proven open source crypto implementations written in the "secure" languages.
As an aside to your aside, LibreSSL is certainly more secure than OpenSSL, and it is written in C. Theo de Raadt doesn't have a PhD (though obviously he's not the only one hacking on LibreSSL).
Re: WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that you have a PhD in cryptography doesn't necessarily mean you know how to write secure code. Especially C code. Lot of people hated OpenSSL quality long before Heartbleed, but it took that vuln for people to actually realize how bad it is. I can imagine a good, secure SSL library being written by somebody without a PhD, in a safer language.
> Especially C code Isn't WhatsApp an Erlang app?
WhatsApp uses Erlang and various other languages. I doubt the encryption code is in Erlang. Erlang can call C code.
Re: WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
#56No 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,…
As long as they manage the public keys for their users, they will be vulnerable to exactly this problem. Indeed, the most secure way is to generate and confirm each other's keys physically. The thought occurred to me that those whom you'd want to truly communicate securely with are likely people you have met via other means already --- including in person --- and so you should already have an effectively independent…
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.
Re: WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact that you have a PhD in cryptography doesn't necessarily mean you know how to write secure code. Especially C code. Lot of people hated OpenSSL quality long before Heartbleed, but it took that vuln for people to actually realize how bad it is. I can imagine a good, secure SSL library being written by somebody without a PhD, in a safer language.
> Especially C code Isn't WhatsApp an Erlang app?
The socket layer at OS-level is written in C and Erlang probably uses an SSL library written in C. Turtles all the way down!
Re: WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
#58No 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,…
> do you know whether the software you got from the App Store is the software that's on Github? Yes: https://whispersystems.org/blog/reproducible-android/
... minus the libraries in native code which also are considerably harder to reverse-engineer than the java parts.
Also, unless you're suspicious and actually check, you could be served a special version by the App Store that was compiled only for you and contains the required add-a-key-but-dont-show-a-popup feature.
I'm not saying that Signal and/or Google are shipping a backdoor. I'm saying that we have to trust them that they don't.
Re: WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that, i think server has ability to request any individual message to be transmitted with new key.
As I mentioned in my comment, any exploit that can only be performed by the server is essentially irrelevant as we already can't have perfect trust in the server. edit: I'll respond to everyone as I worded this poorly. What I mean is that an attack that can only be performed by Facebook/WhatsApp(depending on if you believe they are kept separate) is mostly irrelevant as they could always push an update to the App/Pla…
I thought that was the whole point of end-to-end. That you don't need trust in the server because the messages are opaque. If this is an exploit that can be performed by a compromised server, it's very much relevant
Re: WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
#60"Asked to comment specifically on whether Facebook/WhatApp had accessed users’ messages and whether it had done so at the request of government agencies or other third parties, it directed the Guardian to its site that details aggregate data on government requests by country." This is why people should try and use Signal instead of WhatsApp. You can't trust Facebook to care about your privacy.
It seems hard to expect full privacy from any company based in the US given the government's tendency to force them to allow access.