3 ms·

> Agreed, but those few are the only people for whom E2E-encrypted is a substantial advantage over transport-encrypted. I could not disagree more. This is the

by stouset 10y ago

> Agreed, but those few are the only people for whom E2E-encrypted is a substantial advantage over transport-encrypted. I could not disagree more. This is the difference between large-scale, passive, implicit surveillance of an entire population and small-scale, active, explicit interception of handfuls of individuals at best. > WhatsApp claimed to have true E2E security. And it doesn't. The public needed to be told. You have to stop treating security like it's a binary thing. Threat models are important. It does have E2E security, it just has a tradeoff that allows for the interception of a single message by a nation-state attacker, with the probability of this event being detected increasing dramatically with the number of users they do. This is not even close the same thing as not having true E2E security.

lmm 10y ago
> This is the difference between large-scale, passive, implicit surveillance of an entire population and small-scale, active, explicit interception of handfuls of individuals at best. The large-scale passive surveillance you're talking about in the transport-encryption case could only be happening with the provider's cooperation. I can maybe see Facebook/Microsoft/etc. cooperating with the NSA in that way, but certainly not with the governments mentioned in the letter's rhetoric. And note that a cooperating WhatsApp could do large-scale, passive, implicit surveillance of WhatsApp metadata and use that for targeting active attacks. > You have to stop treating security like it's a binary thing. Threat models are important. It does have E2E security, it just has a tradeoff that allows for the interception of a single message by a nation-state attacker, with the probability of this event being detected increasing dramatically with the number of users they do. An attacker with control of WhatsApp could continue to MitM indefinitely, no? They would be detected only when the users met up and compared security codes, which I suspect even dissidents wouldn't be doing frequently. I agree that WhatsApp is probably more secure, and certainly no less secure, than apps with zero effort at E2E (I more-or-less endorse the preference order given at https://copperhead.co/android/docs/usage_guide https://copperhead.co/android/docs/usage_guide ). But this is a real vulnerability that makes WhatsApp substantially less secure than was previously thought and claimed, and substantially less secure than what someone who just heard "end-to-end encrypted" would expect. It needed to be publicised.

by stouset 10y ago

lmm 10y ago

> This is the difference between large-scale, passive, implicit surveillance of an entire population and small-scale, active, explicit interception of handfuls of individuals at best. The large-scale passive surveillance you're talking about in the transport-encryption case could only be happening with the provider's cooperation. I can maybe see Facebook/Microsoft/etc. cooperating with the NSA in that way, but certainly not with the governments mentioned in the letter's rhetoric. And note that a cooperating WhatsApp could do large-scale, passive, implicit surveillance of WhatsApp metadata and use that for targeting active attacks. > You have to stop treating security like it's a binary thing. Threat models are important. It does have E2E security, it just has a tradeoff that allows for the interception of a single message by a nation-state attacker, with the probability of this event being detected increasing dramatically with the number of users they do. An attacker with control of WhatsApp could continue to MitM indefinitely, no? They would be detected only when the users met up and compared security codes, which I suspect even dissidents wouldn't be doing frequently. I agree that WhatsApp is probably more secure, and certainly no less secure, than apps with zero effort at E2E (I more-or-less endorse the preference order given at https://copperhead.co/android/docs/usage_guide https://copperhead.co/android/docs/usage_guide ). But this is a real vulnerability that makes WhatsApp substantially less secure than was previously thought and claimed, and substantially less secure than what someone who just heard "end-to-end encrypted" would expect. It needed to be publicised.