Absolutely. Of course hackers are reverse engineering WhatsApp, that's how all those nasty exploits it has keep getting sold to governments by the NSO Group. B

Absolutely. Of course hackers are reverse engineering WhatsApp, that's how all those nasty exploits it has keep getting sold to governments by the NSO Group. But reverse engineering is a skill in itself and modern day smartphone OS's use a lot of code obfuscation when apps are compiled. This effectively means even those talented hackers are going through the reverse engineering process pulling at threads until they get lucky. Reverse engineering (in this context, at least) doesn't just show you the code as the developer wrote it. And FB hires a lot of very clever people including cybersecurity experts who could sneak these things in using innocent looking code scrambled around the app. Even open source projects are at risk of having backdoors put in that pass review and simply look like innocent bugs if they get discovered, let alone closed source apps that have to be reverse engineered. Again not going conspiracy nut and saying that's what FB is doing. Just saying it'd be very easy for FB to hide it if they were doing it. To me the biggest confirmed weakness of WhatsApp is the cloud backups. E2EE is pointless when the message database is synced up to iCloud or Google Drive. WhatsApp even tells you this itself. When you enable cloud backups (and they keep bugging you until you do it) it literally tells you the backups aren't secured by E2EE. [1] Because, well, of course they aren't. [1] https://faq.whatsapp.com/iphone/chats/how-to-back-up-to-icloud https://faq.whatsapp.com/iphone/chats/how-to-back-up-to-iclo... "Media and messages you back up aren't protected by WhatsApp end-to-end encryption while in iCloud."