A 10-month Commerce Department probe concluded Meta could view all WhatsApp messages in unencrypted form
So the truth is they store messages encrypted. But what they also do is storing the private keys for those messages.
Meaning they technically do it. But it’s like locking the door for someone who also has the keys.
Creating the secure key pairs used for true E2EE requires a mathematical foundation of true randomness, which can only be achieved on a device by working with the OS, through an API call, to get a random seed that includes pseudorandom numbers from the device’s sensors. There was a post a while back where a dev used ADB to read the API calls used during WhatsApp account setup that showed that no such calls were made, meaning the keys were either totally predictable, or were actually generated by Meta themselves.
Interesting! Is the post available somewhere?
When I read the article about cloudflare using lava lamps (and other things at other locations) to create randomness I had no idea it had to be that crazy to be random.
It actually doesn’t need to be so elaborate. Even a video camera with the lens cap on generates more than enough entropy. Your phone can mix together predictable but unique variations - time of day, free memory, CPU serial number, battery level - with less predictable physical sensory - light level, gyroscope, barometer, last touch points, nearby MAC addresses - to create far more on-board randomness than anyone realistically needs.
That said, the whole Cloudflare lava lamp thing is very cool and also gets people talking.
definitely cool, i want a wall like that. it would be a lot better than the one i kept tipping over and burning shit with in my tiny room at the time
They own the (closed source) app, which has full access to your decrypted messages. The messages might be e2ee in transit, but they must be decrypted for you to read. This means that they also have access to them in this state, the same as you, and there is nothing preventing them from resending those decrypted messages back to their servers while you send them (before they encrypt) or after your receive them (after they decrypt).
The most important question to ask when evaluating end-to-end encryption: who manages the keys?
If Facebook manages all of the keys and is responsible for telling which public key belongs to who, then of course Facebook can read every message.
even better - as far as I am aware the client isn’t open (and even if it were, is your installed build from the same source?).
so, even if the keys are local only, who says there isn’t a hidden API that simply sends locally decrypted content back to a remotely calling endpoint?
Or steganographically leaks back the keys …
thought it was proper e2e
https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
but if whatsapp owns both ends, what is stopping them from just reading the decrypted text? i duno crypto good enough
That, and if WhatsApp has the keys, then no amount of encryption is going to help.
If I remember, the allegation was that they did keep all the keys and many employees could request them to decrypt specific sessions.
oh lol. the trust chain is harder and harder to verify these days. i miss the good old days where I would write emails in vi and encrypt with gpg.
I still write emails with vi. but I lost touch with the one other friend I had who how to use gpg 😂😂😂
There are dozens of us! Dozens!
Is there an ELI5, foolproof, step-by-step tutorial? I tried Kleopatra on my own and was so completely befuddled; why is that, like, literally the only app out there in the whole world for PGP or GPG or whatever? Shouldn’t there be dozens of such encoders?
Cory Doctorow still uses pgp if you email him, I think his key is on his website, IIRC
“The claim that WhatsApp can access people’s encrypted communications is patently false,” Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said. He added that the bureau had already “disavowed this purported investigation, calling its own employee’s allegations unsubstantiated.”
I can’t help but notice that in response to people’s concern that Meta may be able to read people’s messages, the Meta spokesperson responds that WhatsApp can’t read them. A little bit of administrative juggling on Meta’s end so that the team with access to the messages doesn’t fall within the WhatsApp department, and both claims could be true.
Are you telling me that the company that hosts “free” not propaganda services and has been caught repeatedly stealing all possible data including data about women and presumably girls’ periods and has been caught in one of the largest data manipulation scandals this century could be betraying my trust with their “vawwy vawwy pwivate and vawwy vawwy encwypted” closed source and again operated by the most sinister motherfuckers of all time messaging app???
I. Am. Shocked.
I’m also looking for a bridge on the cheap if you guys have any leads.
Yeah, there are lots of ways for this to be true but misleading:
The communications are not encrypted if they have the keys.
The encrypted communications are not the people’s. By the TOS everything is the property of WhatsApp and they can access their own ‘Business Records’ perfectly legally.
A third party, like a federal agency, isn’t WhatsApp. (WhatsApp can also voluntarily give their ‘Business Records’ to said agencies without warrant or subpoena.)
Meta isn’t WhatsApp.
An internal project with an undisclosed codename isn’t WhatsApp.
My favorite option is that they don’t access the encrypted communications, they access messages before encryption takes place and send copies home for safe keeping. With a closed source client they can do anything they want to the plaintext even if they handle the ciphertext appropriately.
Yeah, that or either of the ends is compromised by one of the various commercial spyware which offers zero-click installation of their software or the person you’re talking to is intentionally recording the messages.
End-to-End encryption only protects you from someone eavesdropping on the communication on the line. It doesn’t secure the endpoints or make the participants trustworthy.
Which end is the encrypted end lmao
Nitpicking; even if they have the keys, the messages can be encrypted. It’s just worthless as they can now decrypt them.
Sure, when they say WhatsApp can’t access the encrypted messages they could mean that Meta/another internal group has access to the encrypted messages and they decrypt them in order to provide them to WhatsApp/whoever.
(Obviously, as someone pointed out, this is all assuming that he’s telling the truth in some legalistic way and not just flat out lying.)
C’mon. It’s not that hard. You’re making the assumption that Andy Stone is telling the truth, with a gotchya astrict.
What if…the big business just…LIES???
Then they might get in trouble for false advertising.
In what world do you live where billionsires face actual consequences?
Worst case scenario, Meta pays a small fine, and doesn’t even blink. The day just goes on.
I mean yeah, but they’d usually not pay even a small fine (or pay for legal proceedings), so it’s a lot more efficient to use conveniently placed loopholes.
GDPR has entered the chat
…assuming the EU representatives have some balls
The best lies have some kind of truth in them. Half truths are way more effective than complete falsehoods.
a gotchya astrict
Asterisk? This little fella? *
Nah, probably meant the other little fella - Asterix the Gaul.
It’s likely the cloud backups they can read. Encrypted archives are hard to sync across devices while still keeping the same level of security. I always advise against it if you don’t have a good reason to do it.
It’s also all but confirmed that they use on-device keyword recognition for targeted advertising. So if the app can phone home for some keywords, then it can phone home for anything.
But Facebook/“Meta” would never lie.
Oopsie! Hang on, they even lie to lawmakers in case buying them off fails? Bummer!
Seriously: this company needs to be scoured from the face of the earth.
Mergers: Commission fines Facebook €110 million for providing misleading information about WhatsApp takeover - Brussels, 18 May 2017
Classic
Profit made from yet more abuse of user data: 500m EUR
Cost ofmisleadinglying to lawmakers: 110m EUR
Net profit: 390m EUR
“We got 'em good, boys! I’m sure they’re never going to try that again!”:’( poor general public
If you can’t see the code (closed source) then treat it as they’re lying and it isn’t end to end encrypted
If you still use faecebook products, you’re an idiot.
I’m gonna borrow FaecesBook from you - that’s hilarious!
my brain automatically makes it faecesbook now. I’ve been saying it for a decade or more.
I guess you don’t live in Europe, you can’t escape it here.
bold of you to assume meta respect data privacy, they have been all in on datamining for a while aready
I never assumed that this presumed “end to end encryption” was secure in any way. The key exchange either runs over Meta servers, and they just log them, or the client software simply surrenders the key (maybe always, maybe on demand) together with the data stream that still runs over Meta servers.
I also never assumed it was fully secure either. Like sure it could be secure to hackers since they would still need the keys, but if anyone ever thought Meta was somehow not going to allow themselves access is just crazy and I am shocked anyone thought differently. On top of this they absolutely share all data with the government, im just not sure if it’s by request or full access anytime.
Sadly, everyone i know still uses it so im kind of forced to but at the same time the chats are all dumb anyway so whatever and enjoy reading them Meta employees.
They can log anything they want and have nothing useful, if the encryption protocol is sound.
Have a look at how TLS is designed, if you want to know more.You can have the soundest encryption in the world but if they have access to the keys it doesn’t matter, they can see everything.
But the key exchange is not the issue then.
Access to private keys is.
If the host system, on which the key exchange runs, is compromised, you’re toast.Where’s the private key? I can get a new phone, log with WhatsApp and download all the historical messages without intruducing any additional password or key.
I assume they have all the required data too.
@Railcar8095 @zergtoshi actually is not my exlerience with whatsapp, since I have the backups disable, everytime I change phones I lost all my conversations. But since whatsapp is closed source, the app can indeed use encryption to comunicate p2p, but I will allways assume that the key is logged by meta, “just in case”
Sounds like a compromised phone in the sense that it doesn’t protect (and instead transmit) the private key.
That’s not the phones fault, but how WhatsApp works
How is a phone not compromised if it hosts apps that play into the hands of evil actors?
I know my way around cryptography, therefor I am skeptical. If push comes to shove, they can simply command the Whatsapp App to silently surrender the keys. Nobody would know, it is a closed source app and protocol, and they can hide what they are doing inside the (probably) TLS encrypted stream.
If you think ANYTHING owned by FB is “secure” you had this coming
And here I thought the E2EE of Whatsapp was based on the one developed by Signal or at least so they say.
But I guess it’s hard to inspect anything, if it’s no open source software.
I’m so glad there’s SIgnal and a lot of my contacts use it.
Back when it was called Textsecure it was a different story.I’m just here to satisfy my confirmation bias, but my question all along has been this: how does Meta simultaneously satisfy their claims of both E2EE and content moderation on WhatsApp? I can’t say that I’ve done anything even close to a deep dive on the topic, but those two things seem mutually exclusive.
You can actually report a message to WhatsApp within the app. If you report the message it then the full text gets sent to WhatsApp.
That’s a little disingenuous…
- You receive an encrypted message.
- You decrypt the message.
- You report the message.
- You forward the decrypted message.
When you send a message, no E2EE scheme can prevent your recipient from forwarding the decrypted message to a third party.
Well, yeah, you can’t control other people. Even if you use a walkie-talkie, they can still record your voice with a device. Ideally you should only be talking about safely publishable content, or with mature-enough individuals. We ultimately must settle for good-enough…
It’s really important for people to understand that E2EE cannot protect the message portions that aren’t between the ends themselves. The best encryption in the world can’t help you if the person you’re talking to is an undercover cop, because that “end” can do with the plaintext whatever they want, including record/store/forward the plaintext of any messages they then encrypt and send, or any messages they receive and then decrypt.
That’s not a flaw of the E2EE protocol itself, but is a limit to the scope of protection that E2EE provides.
So… anyone with access to the report API can read any message they want?
Any reported message ? Back when I was doing anti spam at my ISP we could read reported spam from our customers. Obviously not all mails from / to the customers. That would be way disproportionate.
If this is true:
If you report the message it then the full text gets sent to WhatsApp.
That means there’s a software switch that dumps a plaintext copy of a supposedly encrypted message when flipped.
Therefore, all you need to read any WhatsApp message is the ability to flag the message as “reported”, and access to wherever the plaintext copies get sent.
Considering how often security is an afterthought for corporations, the access part is probably easy.
That means there’s a software switch that dumps a plaintext copy of a supposedly encrypted message when flipped.
Kinda, sorta, but no, not really. What’s happening is that the recipient is decrypting the message. When you report the message, you include a cleartext copy with your report.
The “switch” you are talking about is in the same app that is doing the decryption. For the bad actor to toggle that “switch”, they would have to control the app.
For the bad actor to toggle that “switch”, they would have to control the app.
Are you talking about physical control? Regardless, it’s closed-source… There is nothing that says they can’t also generate the keys on the other end that they had your devices generate. Outside of open source code that’s buildable from source, they can claim whatever they want about lack of access to switches.
Technically true.
However, doing so would be perpetrating a fraud. If they denied the capability you’re talking about in response to a warrant or subpoena, someone would be in contempt.
I don’t know if any corpo actually cares about such things, but I know that if you or I were to do this, we’d quickly find ourselves broke and possibly in prison.
The easiest implementation of this is that the recipient of an infringing message flags it from its local client. At that point it’s not encrypted if their claim of e2ee is true.
It also means that only parties involved in the message exchange can flag / report them.
Corporations are often not so monolithic ; the guys doing abuse are likely not the one who try to milk users (looking at you marketing).
I don’t want to defend whatsapp, but if messages are actually properly end to end encrypted, but one of the recipients (one of the ends) knowingly shares it (e.g. with the report function), that is still end to end encryption.
don’t be surprised if signal or matrix implements this. I’m strongly against scanning messages, but if the recipient willfully decides so, they should be able to share a message with moderators. that would be an actual tool against actual pedophiles, and scammers.
but this can only work safely if the client is not sending the decrypted message, because it could modify it, but instead it sends the decryption keys for it. both signal and matrix are regularly rotating the keys, so it wouldn’t grant the moderators to read all messages, but it would grant them the ability to see what was actually sent. with that the client should also show how far into the past messages will be revealed to moderators, so they can decide if that’s ok for them.Yup we agree on that. This pattern is actually the most sensible approach to support privacy. Whatever happens in transmission.
I don’t particularly know much about this specific topic but, it would be trivial for them to read what’s seen in the app. The encrypted part is only during transfer of a message, your app is still decrypting it to plain texts, and meta can just read the message at that point.
Anyone who thinks Facebook would give you end to end encryption is a fucking fool.
I never trusted it and gave up WhatsApp before I even gave up Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has no values and when you realize that basic fact, you’ll never trust him with anything.
I work at Meta and interface with WhatsApp enough to know a couple things. First of all, data is encrypted at rest; that’s not even a WhatsApp thing, that’s literally how our infra works (it’s actually an efficiency thing, since deletions requires only deleting the key). So the “source” of the article saying
“Meta can and does view and store all the text messages, photographs, audio and video recordings” in an unencrypted format.
Is either lying or wrong.
Second of all, the encryption is legit. The only time “Meta employees” and “Contractors” are seeing your message content is when someone reports your message; because the person reporting it is sending a decrypted copy.
It may be true that there is some sort of device-level backdoor on your phone, or possibly that there’s a remote switch of some sort to send a second copy of the message in decrypted format for some targets, but I have not heard or seen this.
Fyi I use Signal and not WhatsApp, but in general I don’t think this article holds much weight
I dont believe you.
Well who creates the keys and who stores them? That’s all you need to have a back door.
So that ad campaign that they ran saying no one but you can see your messages. That was a bit strange that they were pushing it, since no one appeared to be saying otherwise, might be a lie? I never would have guessed.
The fact that Trump’s own goon uses Signal and not WhatsApp should probably tell you all you need to know about using WhatsApp.
Yes, not to mention that their security breach on Signal was of their own making. Some moron invited a member of the press to their chat. XD
