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Security researchers call for Guardian to retract false WhatsApp backdoor story
- idlewords 10y agoNote that the Guardian has published multiple stories about this fake issue, and seems to be doubling down on its coverage: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/whatsapp https://www.theguardian.com/technology/whatsapp The list of names at the end of Zeynep's article is pretty much a who's who of people you don't want to be publicly called wrong by when reporting on security.
- nullc 10y agoThis is not a fake issue.
- bascule 10y agoNeither was the Johnny Can't Encrypt issue. Now 1/7th of humanity is using E2E encryption. Making that happen involved some "security" vs usability tradeoffs (see my response here for the explanation of the scare quotes on security: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445337 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445337)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- idlewords 10y agoNeither is the fact that vaccines can sometimes make you sick or kill you. But putting "VACCINES CAN KILL" as a headline in a mass-circulation paper would be just as wrong, and for the same reasons.
- snowpanda 10y ago>But putting "VACCINES CAN KILL" as a headline in a mass-circulation paper would be just as wrong So you admit it's true, but it's wrong to write it as a headline? It's interesting to see people put their head in the sand regarding the Signal/Whatsapp security flaws.
- tptacek 10y agoThe people who signed this letter are the who's who of the study of cryptographic backdoors. What makes you believe you understand this subject better than they do?
- aaron-lebo 10y agoYou've repeated this sentiment several times (and I believe you are right), but isn't it an appeal to authority?
- maxerickson 10y agoThere's nothing wrong with citing topical experts. The "appeal to authority" fallacy occurs when someone is cited outside their area of expertise or is not an expert.
- mynameisvlad 10y agoYep, this exactly. Most books dealing with logic and fallacies now list it as "Appeal to unqualified authority" or similar.
- EGreg 10y agoI don't think the word "qualified" to qualify the word "authority" makes the appeal to auhority fallacy any truer. Most appeals to authority are actually to qualified authorities - the fallacy is neglecting to provide any reasoning behind the decision. In fact the authority may not have even intended their statement to indicate great certainty, or they may have been influenced by sociological phenomena. Qualified authorities in one century may be shown to be completely wrong. For example bloodletting, phlogiston, or even the age of the earth before radioactivity was discovered. Feynman talks about this... how the number stays close to the others until finally they jump to the right one. "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck
- morganvachon 10y agoA conspiracy theorist would say that it sounds like a hit piece, as if the Guardian has been nudged by some higher power to slander WhatsApp in an attempt to push their general readership to drop E2E encrypted messaging altogether, because the "more secure" options are too difficult or less popular. The Guardian in particular would be chosen because of its normally accurate and privacy-conscious coverage in the past; i.e. it has street cred among activists and others who wish to communicate securely and privately. A realist would, however, see this as a news outlet unable to own their mistake and instead doubling down as you said, in a failed attempt to save face. A journalist wrote this story seemingly by the seat of her pants, and her employer is on a noble if misguided campaign to defend her article. I'm taking the realist path on this one; I don't think there's any grand conspiracy behind their baffling decision to stand behind obviously shoddy reporting. The fact that so many top security researchers -- who certainly aren't going to be influenced by any particular government or corporate interest -- are calling for a retraction is all the assurance I need that the story is baseless and the Guardian is inexplicably enjoying the taste of shoe leather.
- idlewords 10y agoI take the realist path too, but if this kind of negligent disinformation succeeds, people who do want to discredit secure apps will notice and remember.
- ABCLAW 10y agoMaciej, I have tremendous respect for you. What follows is a long post, so please don't feel like I am beating up on you - I am responding to a few things in this thread. --- This wasn't negligent disinformation (post-revision of the usage of 'backdoor') on the part of the Guardian. The reaction to the information presented on the part of the public - to switch to SMS in significant numbers - was irrational. That said, there is a productive issue raised by the Guardian that has been smoked out into the open, namely the revelation of two contradictory assumptions underlying the decision, as discussed by Moxie in the previous HN thread, to defend against state level snooping. The rationale goes a bit like this: 1 - People change keys in the regular course of using Whatsapp. It therefore needs to accept that without impeding usability. 2 - Most users do not care about security enough to prefer one service to another for the Whatsapp market segment - Those users use Signal or other offerings. 3 - Whatsapp's lack of 'post consent' resending is intentional, and designed to prevent the server from knowing who is monitoring the status of their keys. 4 - As such, Whatsapp effectively defends against dragnet surveillance! As security minded individuals will note inappropriate key changes once a MITM attack begins, confer, and determine they have been compromised at scale. The key flaw here is that 2 and 3 mean that for targeted surveillance, powerful attackers are unlikely to be uncovered while exfiltrating specific communications, and likely don't see very much reputational or legal risk to potentially triggering a key change event. So people are vulnerable to feasible, targeted message exfiltration, contrary to what they may have believed when E2E was rolled out. That's newsworthy. The fact that the security community is striking back makes me feel like they are circling the wagons now that the Guardian has caught them with their pants down - They should have been the ones raising these issues and providing the appropriate framing to protect the public.
- msravi 10y ago> The design decision referenced in the Guardian story prevents millions of messages from being lost So it's a classic tradeoff - convenience vs. security, and the Guardian story correctly reported it. > and WhatsApp offers people security notifications to alert them to potential security risks. which is not enabled by default. Sounds to me like apart from the hyperbolic use of the word "backdoor" (which apparently has now been removed), The Guardian is in the clear here.
- idlewords 10y agoThe Guardian headlines (which are still up right now, see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/whatsapp https://www.theguardian.com/technology/whatsapp) refer to an "encryption vulnerability" and "security flaw". These are demonstrably false statements, as the letter explains in detail. The Guardian needs to retract and sanction its editor. The story is journalistic malpractice and puts people at risk. This is not about word use, but about publishing stories that are already causing people in high-risk places to move off of a secure messenger to SMS.
- tomatsu 10y agoSMS isn't the only alternative. People who are worried about encryption also won't use SMS. Signal doesn't make that bad trade-off, for example. There are viable alternatives.
- idlewords 10y agoRead the letter in full (I'm not being flippant, I mean it sincerely), as it addresses this exact issue. There's empirical evidence that people switch off to SMS. In places like Egypt, people share phones, swap SIM cards routinely, and Signal's nondelivery behavior is a non-starter. Zeynep does research on this and has written a lot about it; it's fascinating (and depressing) reading. The point is that these are not hypothetical scare scenarios. We have the data and that's why it's so urgent to chastise this kind of reckless coverage.
- tptacek 10y ago
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- stefantalpalaru 10y agoFrom the open letter on http://technosociology.org/?page_id=1687 http://technosociology.org/?page_id=1687 : > The behavior described in your article is not a backdoor in WhatsApp. This is the overwhelming consensus of the cryptography and security community. It is also the collective opinion of the cryptography professionals whose names appear below. The behavior you highlight is a measured tradeoff that poses a remote threat in return for real benefits that help keep users secure, as we will discuss in a moment. What real benefits are gained from making it easy for ISP-level attackers to mount man-in-the-middle attacks? Security from your spouse snooping on your phone? What's the threat model here and why are these experts so adamant in minimizing the security risks? Moxie went as far as to ignore the opt-in aspect of the (very benign looking) key change notification, but he's on the payroll. What's the motivation of the other experts in this sudden "overwhelming consensus"?
- maxerickson 10y agoSome of the motivation is that users who need security tend to switch sims fairly often. If the messaging system doesn't deliver messages when that happens, they will stop using it.
- stefantalpalaru 10y agoSwitching SIMs means switching accounts, because phone numbers are usernames, right? Why would the application hide this by default? Also, why would the key change be hidden by default when the phone number doesn't change? This is the actual mechanism described by Tobias Boelter in his report: https://tobi.rocks/2016/04/whats-app-retransmission-vulnerability/ https://tobi.rocks/2016/04/whats-app-retransmission-vulnerab... Is this done to facilitate the "same SIM, lost local storage" scenario? Then the phone number is not only username but also a password and anybody able to steal the phone (or just the number) can impersonate a WhatsApp user. Is this the level of security these experts are protecting?
- tptacek 10y agoThe open letter answers your question. I'll flip it around on you: what makes you think you're seeing some important wrinkle of this problem that Matthew Green, Bruce Schneier, Matt Blaze, Steve Checkoway, Chris Palmer, Dave Adrian, Bart Preneel, Jonathan Zdziarski, Steve Bellovin, and Emin Gür Sirer aren't seeing? Many of these people study backdoors, and crypto backdoors in particular, practically full-time.
- mbgaxyz 10y agoBruce Schneier: "How serious this is depends on your threat model. If you are worried about the US government -- or any other government that can pressure Facebook -- snooping on your messages, then this is a small vulnerability. If not, then it's nothing to worry about." https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/whatsapp_securi.html https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/whatsapp_secu...
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 10y agoA reminder, for people scratching their heads over how any legitimate-seeming criticism of the trade-off WhatsApp took could generate this much ire from this many experts: WhatsApp has something like a billion users. Virtually none of them asked for end-to-end encryption. They don't know that they want it, but they got it anyways when Whisper worked with WhatsApp to add Signal Protocol to WhatsApp. But just because they don't want it doesn't mean they don't need it. Many WhatsApp users badly need messaging security that works better than their alternatives. They don't know it, but with the flip of a switch, they got that security. More than anything else, this is why Dan Boneh and the RealWorldCrypto steering committee awarded Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin the Levchin crypto prize this year. Comes now The Guardian with a story saying "WHATSAPP BACKDOORED, BAD, SWITCH". None of WhatsApp's users are close to being able to evaluate what that means. But they know what "bad" and "switch" means. And in the global-scale game of telephone we're all playing now, that's what they're doing. You don't have to wonder: Zeynep will tell you it's happening. Nerds on Twitter are puzzled. Isn't this a good thing? Signal is even stricter about security than WhatsApp. Wouldn't it be better for all these people to be on Signal? WhatsApp users will in fact probably try installing Signal. They'll even use it for a couple minutes. But their peers aren't on Signal, and they're switching immediately to messengers where they can find their friends. Not WhatsApp, though: The Guardian (or their shrill uncle on Facebook) told them not to. Nope, they're switching to SMS. State security services could not be happier about this. You can't buy this kind of PR for money; you have to spend security researcher vanity to get it. Zeynep will tell you about this too: there are state telecom and security apparatuses right now signal-boosting The Guardian's irresponsible report. And there are activists circulating warnings to switch from WhatsApp to other messengers. It's a disaster: the lie is outrunning us. The Guardian must retract this story, clearly and loudly. There's a way to report on the tradeoffs WhatsApp made, but this wasn't it; this was "VACCINES MAY CAUSE AUTISM". Don't take my word for it: look at who signed the letter, including Matthew Green, Bruce Schneier, Matt Blaze, Steve Checkoway, Chris Palmer, Dave Adrian, Bart Preneel, Jonathan Zdziarski, Steve Bellovin, and Emin Gür Sirer.
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago> WhatsApp has something like a billion users. Virtually none of them asked for end-to-end encryption. They don't know that they want it, but they got it anyways when Whisper worked with WhatsApp to add Signal Protocol to WhatsApp. > But just because they don't want it doesn't mean they don't need it. Many WhatsApp users badly need messaging security that works better than their alternatives. They don't know it, but with the flip of a switch, they got that security. Most of them probably don't know they have it, either. This is a good thing: People can be safe without knowing how safe they are. The industry should be moving more people towards secure defaults. Yes, security nerds will want something harder to attack in the middle. That's fine: They can build their own perfect security tools, and nobody will use them.
- jknz 10y agoThe logic behind this seems off? Signal and whastapp have different behaviors regarding this. (Signal does not have the issue of re-sending messages as was previously reported here). This letter signed by a lot of very serious security cryptographers means that there is a consensus among the community about the "best" behavior in terms of security, trade-offs, etc. If there is indeed a consensus about what the "best" behavior is, then both Whatsapp and Signal should adopt this "best" behavior. However Whatsapp and Signal do not have adopted the same behavior. So the consensus does not seem to be there, otherwise both Whatsap and Signal would have adopted the "best" consensual behavior. So by first order logic... There is no consensus on this?
- maxerickson 10y agoThey target different users.
- tptacek 10y agoNo, that's not what the consensus is about. Many of the people who signed this letter disagree about what the ideal UX of a secure messenger is. It's not about ideal UX. Nobody knows what that UX is yet. WhatsApp is the first messenger with a world-scale userbase to tackle this problem; they're on the vanguard of work on this problem. Signal has a much smaller userbase and, importantly, that userbase adopts Signal specifically to get cryptographic security. Signal can innovate in different directions than WhatsApp, and WhatsApp can in the long term adopt the techniques Signal comes up with that actually work out. It's a good thing that there is both a messenger that protects a billion people without them having to understand public key crypto and another messenger that protects a much smaller number of people but that also serves as a laboratory for crypto UX. If you understand just one thing about the WhatsApp/Guardian dilemma, understand this: 99.99% of WhatsApp's users don't care about cryptographic security. They don't even know what that means. But that doesn't mean they don't need cryptographic security. Many of them need it badly whether they know it or not. But they're only going to use messengers that will allow them to talk to their peers, and none of their peers are on Signal. If you tell them WhatsApp is bad, they move to SMS.
- idlewords 10y agoThe letter addresses this. The behavior is a trade-off, and you have to decide how to handle it. For a product with a billion users, where the threat model is mass surveillance, it is a good trade-off to never drop messages. For a product with more specialized users, who may be individually targeted, it is a good trade-off to not deliver buffered messages after a key change, and warn instead. There is no "best" behavior in the abstract, you have to take into account the setting.
- robrenaud 10y agoHow do you know what a closed source app is doing? How do you know that they won't just go and change the code to send plain text messages to a log somewhere?
- tptacek 10y agoThe same way you know whether any other app on your phone is doing that, regardless of whether its codebase is proprietary or GPL: you analyze the binary. Up-and-coming security researchers do this for sport in their spare time.
- CiPHPerCoder 10y agohttp://binary-auditing.com http://binary-auditing.com Binaries aren't magic.
- iwlbebnd 10y agoBinaries which have a client-server architecture certainly are. Is the claim the full WhatsApp stack is open to regular indepedent third party security audits from multiple firms?
- CiPHPerCoder 10y agoYou don't need to know what the server does with your data if the client is encrypting it properly. The client-server architecture is irrelevant here. Read this, then flip the roles: https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/03/client-authenticity-is-not-server-s-problem https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/03/client-authenticity-is-no... Reverse engineer the client-side app. You now know what the client-side app (the part that people want to be open source) is doing. You don't need to know what the server's code is doing.
- iwlbebnd 10y agoWhich is exactly the issue? At any time the server can request a key reset and have messages resent. I don't see how it is at all irrelevant since it is exactly what the cause is here.
- feral 10y agoThere's a split in the HN community on this issue. The split seems to be: - Some people are OK with compromise for usability - Others think being uncompromising is the only way to eventually achieve security. (This group is also, rightly imo, suspicious of WhatsApp/Facebook or any centralized product) I do understand the latter mindset. Often the only way to get high security is dogged attention to detail, letting nothing slide. Attackers love to promote products which provide the illusion of security, but contain flaws or backdoors; and often the illusion of security is worse than nothing. But I'm with the group that favors usability compromise here. Open source projects have successfully built high security products, but rarely gotten mass consumer adoption, precisely because of an unwillingness to make concessions to usability. Without usability concessions, we end up with 30 character random login passwords - written on stickies on the terminal. Even if you don't agree with the particular compromises in this case, please engage with those who do. There's no reason to think they are shills trying to undermine security. Favoring usability here is at least reasonable, with the same shared end goal of increased security for end users - this should be acknowledged, especially given the mass adoption success of WhatsApp/OWS.
- lmm 10y agoIf we don't care about being secure against an attacker who controls Facebook then what was the point of end-to-end encryption in the first place? If you're going to "compromise" that far you might as well just use any number of centralised messengers with transport encryption. > There's no reason to think they are shills trying to undermine security. Moxie's comments about OpenPGP are ample reason. And in any case our response needs to be robust against the possibility that they are. > this should be acknowledged, especially given the mass adoption success of WhatsApp/OWS. The mass adoption is precisely why it's so important.
- stouset 10y agoPeople aren't using WhatsApp to replace GPG with a carefully-curated web of trust. They're using it to replace SMS which can be surveilled both en masse by governments and telecoms, and surveilled by individuals savvy enough to set up a fake cell tower. WhatsApp is an unqualified success in this regard. That it makes trade-offs unsuitable for dissidents of world governments does not diminish this.
- kahrkunne 10y agoThe Guardian is a fake news website. Of course they won't pull it.
- scholia 10y agoThe Guardian has trained and experienced reporters, a code of conduct to keep them honest, subeditors who are also fact checkers, and an ombudsman (Readers' editor) with independent power to cross check and correct mistakes. It's also owned by a charitable trust, and is under no obligation to publish the lies preferred by its non-existent fat-cat proprietor. Calling it a fake new site says more about you than it says about the Guardian.
- kahrkunne 10y agoNone of that changes anything about the fact that they regularly publish half-truths or outright lies, though. As is the case in this situation. There's a big gap between theory and practice.
- scholia 10y agoA small gap, which is hardly unusual given that humans are not perfect. It's still not a fake news site. There are plenty of those, and telling lies about the Guardian doesn't help anyone.
- Dan_JiuJitsu 10y agoThe vulnerability in WhatsApp was correctly described by the Guardian. Signal is more secure and does not have this vulnerability. How, exactly is suggesting users migrate to a more secure messaging platform misleading in any way?
- tptacek 10y agoBecause, once again, the billion-plus WhatsApp users don't use WhatsApp because they care about cryptography; they use it because it's the most dependable method they have to communicate with their peer group. If The Guardian tells them to switch to Signal because WhatsApp is bad, they'll use Signal for 4 minutes before switching to SMS --- which is what's actually happening.
- Dan_JiuJitsu 10y agoSo, we agree that calling this a 'fake' article is itself misleading. We also agree that Signal is a more secure alternative. Your position is essentially 'people cant be trusted with accurate information, you have to dumb it down so they can make the "right" choice based on the limited information they can absorb, so the Guardian should apologize and retract their accurate story.'
- tptacek 10y agoDoes this kind of rhetoric work for you in other venues?
- idlewords 10y agoNon-experts can't be expected to make an accurate evaluation of the UX trade-offs in handling buffered message delivery after a key change. They trust that the Guardian, a highly reputable newspaper, has spoken to experts in the field, done the research, and made this evaluation, which it accurately reflected in the headline. That trust is misplaced. That's why this is a fake story.
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- michel-slm 10y agoAs a Guardian supporting member, I'm forwarding this directly to their editorial complaints. There are other publications that deserve my money if the Guardian refuses to stop being sensationalist.
- tptacek 10y agoThank you. This is really exactly what needs to happen. My understanding, thirdhand, is that The Guardian ran this story based on a single source; Moxie apparently tried to talk to them and was rebuffed. The Guardian must retract this story, loudly and clearly. Moreover, in the future, The Guardian and every outlet like it needs to understand that stories like this require more than one source. If you've got a legitimate story about a crypto backdoor in a popular product, security researchers will fall over themselves to comment on it. As you can see in this case, they're falling over themselves to disavow it. In the last hour, we've added Collin Mulliner, Matt Blaze, Peter Honeyman (\o/), Chris Kanich, and Nicolas Christin --- and all we're doing is circulating the letter on Twitter. It'll pick up steam from there. This is not a position The Guardian or any other major news outlet should ever find itself in. This situation is what the concept of "retraction" was invented to cover.
- baybal2 10y agoif Whatsapp can snoop on user conversations, their app is not a secure medium of communication. It has a security hole. IT IS INSECURE
- baybal2 10y agoif Whatsapp can snoop on user conversations, their app is not a secure medium of communication
- Ar-Curunir 10y agoIt's not a backdoor, but it's not "not a protocol flaw" either. If The Guardian had reported it as a flaw in the protocol, would you have been okay with the coverage?
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- roddux 10y agoI'm not much for conspiracy theories, but it's interesting to note that The Guardian actually recommends people concerned about surveillance to stop using WhatsApp, without offering any alternatives. >If you use WhatsApp as a way to avoid government surveillance due to its end-to-end encryption service, you should stop using it immediately. In the wake of the UK snoopers charter having sailed through parliament, this seems odd. Occam's razor tells us that it's coincidence and bad reporting, but still.
- tptacek 10y agoState security services can't buy this kind of PR with money; only a cocktail of vanity and incompetence can do it.
- m3ta 10y agoOccam's razor is a good guide to avoid critical thinking.
- dijit 10y agoTheGuardian was also one of the publications allowed access to the unfettered and uncensored Snowden documents.
- idlewords 10y agoThe Guardian is a big place. Note that this article was written by a freelancer. It's not a coded signal to the readership to beware; it's an egregious error of editorial judgement, followed by doubling down to avoid admitting error.
- TillE 10y agoThey also fucked up catastrophically when handling documents from Wikileaks: https://wikileaks.org/Guardian-journalist-negligently.html https://wikileaks.org/Guardian-journalist-negligently.html
- makomk 10y agoThe Guardian recommends that if people do need to switch as a result of this, they switch to Signal: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-encryption-backdoor-snooping-signal https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-... As far as I can tell, this has been their recommendation ever since their first article about this was published.
- iwlbebnd 10y agoApparently some members are more equal than others since if I tried to post a dozen times in this thread I'd be banned. In fact posting this will likely result in flags and a banning. Keep this in mind, how open and trustworthy can a discussion be when speech is so very privileged between members.
- baybal2 10y agoGuardian did good, now it will stirr things up. Now, even if WhatsAppers will disable retransmission, the amount of flame on the topic will ensure that they are labelled as backdoored until the end of days. WhatsApp, please go down
- WhitneyLand 10y agoThe Guardian made a mistake. They mischaracterized the issue. Now they're trying to correct it and offering a forum for rebuttal. The comparison with vaccines is actually offensive to me as someone negatively affected by that controversy. In general I want potential issues like this to be noted (when properly defined and characterized) and debated. These experts are arguing that WhatsApp makes the best possible trade offs given their user base. I don't agree and think it's worthy of discussion. The tradeoff they refer to is really a UX/product design decision.
- idlewords 10y agoWhy is the vaccine comparison offensive to you?
- scholia 10y agoAndrew Wakefield's autism claims were not based on honest scientific research. Do you think that Tobias Boelter faked his research? That's what your comparison implies....
- rockdoe 10y agoPeople are saying "VACCINES CAN KILL", not "VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM", FYI. One is true based on honest scientific research. And headlining it that way in The Guardian would be just as grossly negligent as what they did.
- idlewords 10y agoI'm not referring to autism, but rare fatalities from vaccination due to things like anaphylactic shock. It is documented that they happen, and they are also a terrible reason not to vaccinate.
- scholia 10y agoRather old story. It was the Wakefield saga that kicked off the anti-vaxxing thing...
- tlogan 10y agoFirst Question: Lets suppose I'm human right activist in Egypt. If I enabled security notification in WhatsApp and other person's phone is captured by authorities but they cannot unlock it so they make it that user lost their phone. Now, if I send the message to that user, is this message received by other party with warning that is not encrypted or it is not delivered at all? Second Question: Is there any guarantee that server cannot change settings on the client?
- lmm 10y ago> Now, if I send the message to that user, is this message received by other party with warning that is not encrypted or it is not delivered at all? It's delivered and then you see the warning. > Is there any guarantee that server cannot change settings on the client? No. Prior to this story I would have assumed there would at least be some risk of being caught by security professionals, but I guess the security community would be falling over itself to explain how the backdoor was an accident or a legitimate usability choice.
- stefantalpalaru 10y ago> other person's phone is captured by authorities but they cannot unlock it They don't need to. They just take out the SIM card, put it in another phone, install WhatsApp and now they can impersonate that person.
- jakobegger 10y agoWhen Apple said that iMessage uses end-to-end encryption, everyone started complaining that it's not real end-to-end since we have to trust Apple for key exchange. Now we have the same thing with What's App: we have to trust them with the key exchange. It's marginally better, since they have an optional way to enable notifications after a key was changed. I applaud the Guardian to run with the story. Whether to call it a back door / flaw / trade-off is just quarreling over semantics, when the important part is that you need to trust a central service. If you want to be sure that noone can intercept your messages, use PGP or S/MIME, (preferably encrypting your message on an air-gapped computer) Saying that we shouldn't worry about state-level actors is a bit naive after PRISM was revealed. If you are doing something that someone in power might dislike, you should not rely on Whats App.
- jocro 10y ago> Whether to call it a back door / flaw / trade-off is just quarreling over semantics I think this is writing off a significant portion of the meta-story here, semantics matter very much in journalism. While the technical nuances of trust are important, they won't be understood or digested by the average reader. What will be remembered is the headline, which doesn't say "Whatsapp is as secure as iMessage" it just says "Whatsapp has a backdoor". The story you tell is framed by the audience that's listening, and the framing the Guardian chose unfairly paints Whatsapp as not just secure, but less secure than alternatives by singling them out. That's not an accurate story.
- newsat13 10y agoI cannot believe many of the people here are appealing to authority. Stop all the bush and trump bashing then. I imagine none of the bashers have any clue on how to run a country. The politicians know "better", sp let's respect whatever they decide on our behalf.
- electic 10y agoback door ˈˌbak ˈdô(ə)r/ noun noun: backdoor 1. the door or entrance at the back of a building. 2. a feature or defect of a computer system that allows surreptitious unauthorized access to data. Seems like a backdoor to me. The reality is that the way it is implemented allows a foreign government to see messages it is not supposed to see...and that is a defect. I thank the Guardian for taking the lead on this and bring this issue to light.
- bostik 10y agoI posted this in the other[tm] thread earlier today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13442653 Basically everyone in this thread who are NOT signatories to the open letter could spend their time a lot worse than by listening to the segment with Alec Muffatt. I may disagree with some of his opinions on the desired UX, but the technical details and threat model considerations are very thorough and thought out.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y agoReading this thread I want to be the Guardian, half of the comments assume >1 Billion of people are reading the Guardian and act on articles.
- idlewords 10y agoWord gets around. People attending the Women's March in DC got an email telling them not to use WhatsApp. We have evidence that people in authoritarian countries outside the US are moving off WhatsApp based on this article. All it takes is a rumor.
- _Codemonkeyism 10y agoMost comments here are like not reporting HTTPS certificate problems/MITM leakage with arguing that it's better to have HTTPS than not. I wonder what people here would say if browsers would act with certificates the way WhatsApp handles key renewal. We even discuss certificate pinning etc. in the web space.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 10y agoI'm not sure if I understood the issue fully: Assuming both parties have the "show security warnings" setting enabled and take it seriously, but ignore the lack of "message delivered" checkmarks, can the attacker snoop on one message or multiple ones? As soon as the message is delivered it cannot be resent anymore, but could the attacker refuse to provide the delivery confirmations, then perform the attack (getting all messages that weren't yet marked as delivered, potentially over a large timeframe, while also showing the warning)? If so, I'd say it is a thing to worry about. A smart attacker could wait until one party is switching phones, so that the warning is not considered suspicious, and since they could swap the new-correct key in immediately afterwards, users would be likely to dismiss the missing checkmarks and double key-change notification (at least before this news was published). Also, for phone calls, WhatsApp only shows the warning after the call. I don't believe these are backdoors, but I'm surprised WhatsApp isn't taking it more seriously and trying to address it.
- xaa 10y agoAs an "expert" in another area that has been invoked a few times in this thread, biology (WRT the vaccine analogy), I do sympathize with the position of tptacek and others. It is so very tempting to think that we experts not only know the facts better than the public, which we usually do, but that we also know what's best for the public. But I fear that withholding valid but easily misinterpretable information from the public is a dangerous road to go down. It puts us in the position of making choices for people. You can see how, if we start withholding information from the public because we feel they are too ignorant to handle it, it creates a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. 2017 is really not a very good time for experts in any field to be telling others to do things "because we say so" or to ask that information be withheld because we know what's best for people. For better and worse, people are increasingly distrusting expertise and, as a consequence, (trying to) think for themselves. This can be a good thing if we let go of a little ego. On the other hand, our remaining credibility is fragile, and we need to spend it wisely. It also does create the appearance of hypocrisy, although not necessarily the reality, when security researchers are in favor of full and public disclosure in some cases but not others.
- idlewords 10y agoNobody is talking about withholding information. What we're talking about is framing a story about a fairly subtle point of security UI design in a way that doesn't panic people into moving from a secure messenger to SMS, which is actually happening and which is a terrible outcome. Ancillary to that, imagine a major story about vaccine risk that didn't talk to any doctors. That's what the Guardian did here.
- xaa 10y ago> Nobody is talking about withholding information. A request for retraction is very close to a request to do just this. I will explain more below, though. > major story about vaccine risk that didn't talk to any doctors I think this analogy is not quite right. In a story about vaccine risk, you'd maybe talk to one epidemiologist, one immunologist, one pharmacologist, etc. In this story, they have done something similar: Boelter as the expert (yes, only a PhD student, not optimal to be sure) on the technical aspects of the vulnerability, and several others commenting on the broader social and privacy implications. And this is very important because the letter writers and the EFF admit, when pressed, that it is indeed a vulnerability, or threat, or what-have-you. They would prefer the framing of "UX tradeoff", but that is because their core criticism here is seemingly not about anything technical, it's the fear, as you have said and which I do not deny is legitimate, that people will use this information the wrong way. It is this point I was responding to. If the authors of the open letter do not have valid technical concerns (other than "backdoor", which was edited), their work is done, both on the philosophical grounds I listed above, and on the practical grounds that experts do not get to dictate tone, implications, or framing to journalists. The oddest thing about it all is that the researchers seem to even agree with the Guardian that Signal is more secure. So to recap, the technical aspects of the vulnerability are not disputed, and even the recommendation of using product X over Y if you care about security is not disputed. It is the fear that people will use product Z, which the Guardian did not even mention, instead of Y that is the problem! It is based on these facts plus the call for a retraction that I have concluded that the security researchers in this case are trying to withhold, or at least control, the flow of information to the public based purely on the (justified) fear that some of the public will react incorrectly. Just imagine how the conversation between the Guardian and the US and UK governments must have gone during the Snowden revelations. I am sure they were bombarded with many consequentialist arguments about why publishing them have all kinds of bad effects. But the role of journalists isn't to decide what's good or bad, or how people should use what they publish, it's simply to publish factual information. The only grounds for retraction should be factual inaccuracy.
- WillyOnWheels 10y agoThe Whatsapp is backdoored people are mailing this story around https://rbth.com/news/2017/01/16/whatsapp-helps-chechen-police-foil-terror-attacks_682196 https://rbth.com/news/2017/01/16/whatsapp-helps-chechen-poli...