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> 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

• idlewords 10y ago
  The 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 ago
    SMS 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 ago
      Read 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
      You don't understand the concern. People who are worried about encryption by and large weren't using WhatsApp to begin with. The problem is people who aren't worried about encryption, but should be, and were being silently and effectively helped by WhatsApp's Signal Protocol feature. The only message those people are getting is "WHATSAPP BAD, SWITCH". And switch they are, but not to Signal (none of their friends on are on Signal). Nope, they're adopting insecure alternatives, where they can actually talk to their peers.
      • putlake 10y ago
        If people aren't worried about encryption why are they switching?
        • tptacek 10y ago
          Because people are telling them that WhatsApp is backdoored and that they should switch. They don't know anything about cryptography, but they're not idiots: they know what "bad" means.
          • RodericDay 10y ago
            What are they switching into?
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
  • Ar-Curunir 10y ago
    It is a security flaw; it's probably not a backdoor. The flaw is as follows: I'm trying to send you a message, but your phone is offline and lost. When you get a new phone, your key has changed, but WhatsApp will deliver my message before informing me of the key change. This applies also to calls and such (which shouldn't be "delivered" if the other person is offline). Why could this be bad? WhatsApp could exploit it as follows (maybe under orders from the govt.): 1) Make it seem like a user lost their phone. 2) Wait for a message to be delivered to the user's account. 3) Bring the user back online with a new key (generated by WhatsApp themselves). 4) Read the "encrypted" message. It's a real vulnerability in the protocol, but the severity depends on your threat model. As I said above, this might be an acceptable trade off for messaging, but not for things like calls, where if the user is offline you don't want the call to go through anyway. All this has been pointed out clearly by the student who discovered it.
    • idlewords 10y ago
      It's a security/usability trade-off, not a flaw. Making Signal show white-on-white text would make it more secure against attackers reading over your shoulder. So why doesn't Signal do that? These are legitimate trade-offs that the Guardian is portraying as vulnerabilities.
      • Ar-Curunir 10y ago
        You're being facetious here with the strawman; this is clearly a choice in the protocol that exposes something that is not exposed by, say, Signal. Even if it is a deliberate choice, it doesn't necessarily make it not a flaw; as I said, it depends on your threat model. Anyway, I don't think it's a reasonable choice. How any times do people change phones?!? Even if you're rich you don't do that more than once a year. It doesn't happen often enough for the user to become "accustomed" to warnings and simply click through them.
        • idlewords 10y ago
          I'm not joking here, or making a strawman argument. You could make Signal show white-on-white, so the recipient had to select text to see it. But you don't, because shoulder surfing is not the threat model for Signal. And individually targeted MITM attacks by governments that can take over a server are not the threat model for WhatsApp.
  • lmm 10y ago
    It is a vulnerability and it is a flaw. Do you think this is the first time a group of authoritative experts have tried to claim to the Guardian that their truth-telling is not in the public interest?
    • tedunangst 10y ago
      When has this particular group of experts previously claimed that the Guardian's "truth-telling" is not in the public interest?
      • lmm 10y ago
        I'm not saying it's the same group of experts. I'm saying think how it looks from the Guardian's side.
  • baybal2 10y ago
    >refer to an "encryption vulnerability" and "security flaw". These are s, as the letter explains in detail. Referrence to a clear demonstration of a security vulburability in the protocol as a lie, is a demonstrably false statement
• maxerickson 10y ago
  Not removed from this article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-encryption-backdoor-snooping-signal https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/13/whatsapp-... And the "Should I stop using WhatsApp?" section is basically exactly what the letter is railing against.
• bascule 10y ago
  Most key change events are innocuous, so a key change in and of itself carries much more noise than signal, in the same way most HTTPS errors are not MitM attacks but misconfigurations. Asking the proverbial Johnny to make a security decision each time happens will result in alert fatigue. The overwhelming majority of users will always accept the new key because they just want the app to work. They are not a magical panacea that makes MitM attacks go away. There are two good solutions to this for users who care, however: - Verify keys with each other in person - Move to Key Transparency / CONIKS-like systems for auditing key servers
  • anon1385 10y ago
    >in the same way most HTTPS errors are not MitM attacks but misconfigurations. It's interesting that you make this comparison. For a while now I've been of the position that web browsers should scrap all TLS user interface stuff (padlocks, green bars, invalid cert warnings, self signed cert warnings etc), because it doesn't communicate any information that the average user can make any use of. It's only one aspect of what makes a site 'secure' for users, and probably one of the far less important ones. The vast majority of attacks on users (info being stolen, malware being served etc) come from the site itself being compromised, not from MitM attacks by their ISP. The vast majority of warnings about bad certs are due to somebody forgetting to update it or config issues, not because of real MitM attacks. The vast majority of people just click through cert warnings. The padlock icon in the browser doesn't even do the one thing it promises since it's no guarantee that TLS is being applied all the way to the actual web server. XSS is a bigger threat to the average user but browsers don't warn about sites that aren't using CSP. My theory is that browser devs always knew the padlock icon was bullshit snake oil, but they implemented it at the demand of the e-commerce industry. At the time it was difficult to get people to trust the web enough to enter their credit card details. Providing a meaningless 'security' icon was needed to bootstrap consumer trust in the industry.
    • eridius 10y ago
      The padlock isn't meaningless. It means you can submit passwords and credit card details without someone else in the internet cafe sniffing your traffic. The only thing it doesn't do is it doesn't protect you from MitM (or verify the legal identity of the entity you're talking to). The green EV certificate stuff is what's supposed to tell you that you're safe from MitM and phishing, because you can verify the legal identity of the entity you're talking to. Really the biggest problem is browsers like Chrome that use green padlock/text for DV certs, because that's misleading and either makes people trust the DV certs more than they should, or distrust EV certs. Safari does this much better, using a grey padlock (and no other text) for DV certs, and showing Green padlock + green text for EV certs.
• makomk 10y ago
  The problem that the Guardian is complaining about is that, even if you enable the security notifications, they only appear after some of your messages have potentially been sent to the attacker. In the case of voice calls, the warning apparently only appears after the call ends!
• _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
  This is how companies have learned to act. Implement something for their benefit and the masses who don't care. When called out point to an a setting somewhere and call it a non-issue, "you can turn this on if you care". So they do what they want and can easily deflect all criticism. Facebook is not the first here and certainly not the last.