4 ms·

> "WhatsApp provides default end-to-end encryption for over 3 billion people". Wasn't there news lately that they can still read your messages somehow?

4gotunameagain 9mo ago
Every encryption is end to end if you're not picky about the ends, or metadata. Do you trust facebook (excuse me, meta) to not snoop on your messages, and to not share them with the "intelligence" agencies ?
- Fripplebubby 9mo ago
  This is not true. The IETF draft is explicit that E2EE means that the message cannot be read by any party other than the sender and the intended receiver. When companies like Meta claim they support E2EE, this is what they claim. There are no tricky semantics or legalese at play here.
  - monocasa 9mo ago
    To be fair zoom did claim E2EE, with one of the ends being their servers.
    - morpheuskafka 9mo ago
      Speaking of Zoom and encryption, its crazy that they bought Keybase (I think they basically said it was largely an acquihire) years ago, and have neither shut it down as everyone thought, nor materially changed it in any way. Unless they changed something it even gives 200GB cloud storage (KBFS) iirc.
  - antonvs 9mo ago
    It's not entirely accurate to say "any party other than the sender and the intended receiver," since the messaging app running on the user's device can read the messages. Something like "any third party (other than the app vendor)" would be more accurate. Without actually analyze app behavior, it comes down to trusting that the vendor doesn't do anything nefarious.
    - rvnx 9mo ago
      As far as I remember, Google does the final signing of the APK, which is eventually the signature verified by the OS to verify if an update is valid or not. So Google can, if ordered or willing to help, create a new release track (e.g. experimental-do-not-deleted) and add specific e-mails to that track with the "improved" version. Nobody would be able to see that in real world, and you know what, if WhatsApp themselves are ordered, they can also create their own "test" track, it's just less covert but it would technically be working. In all cases, Google and Apple have to respect US laws, and the laws of earning money too. If you do not cooperative with intelligence / police services of your country, only bad things can happen.
      - mr_mitm 9mo ago
        Yes, the app could be compromised, or the OS, or the compiler of the app, or of the OS, or the OS of the compiler, or the CPU any of these things run on, etc. etc. None of that is relevant to the definition of E2EE.
        antonvs 9mo ago
        It's relevant to how E2EE is described to users. Representing that it's not possible for anyone other than the sender or recipient to read messages is misleading and just incorrect in general. A particularly relevant point is when it comes to government interception. E.g. it would be perfectly possible for an messaging app to have a "wiretap mode" that the vendor enables for users that are the subject of a relevant warrant.
    - Fripplebubby 9mo ago
      I think the draft covers this well: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-knodel-e2ee-definition-04.html#name-end-to-end-principle-2 https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-knodel-e2ee-definition...
      - antonvs 9mo ago
        Technical drafts will tend to get this right, where the communication often breaks down is how it's communicated to users.
  - rvnx 9mo ago
    > When companies like Meta claim they support E2EE, this is what they claim. Well, that statement can only resolve to true. These requests of data collection are perfectly legal. FBI DITU gives an order: give me all chats from *@banana.com and they receive banana.com. From there, two choices from the perspective of a tech provider: a) You accept. You get paid. You can always claim you had been coerced / are a victim, and that everything has been done by the law. b) You refuse. It's a crime. You take the risk to lose over 250K per day (!) in fines, some other court scandals that will come to you, some shady private stuff (what if we learn about your secret jacuzzi ?), harassement of the team, be publicly shamed that you supported terrorists who caused actual death of Americans, etc. In addition, nobody will know that you are the privacy hero and you are not even sure that the data is not exfiltrated another way. To this day, Apple, Facebook, Google still deny participating in illegal requests. They claim these were lawful requests, that have been carefully looked one-by-one. Yes, we looked carefully and decided we won't enjoy losing 100M USD and go to jail. The trick is that the identifier / wildcard can be very vague and wide. Or there can be multiple of them, each of them are narrow, but put one of top of the other they are super wide.
  - jolmg 9mo ago
    Do companies that claim E2EE support face consequences if they don't abide by IETF's definition? Not like IETF governs them.
- miki123211 9mo ago
  > Do you trust facebook (excuse me, meta) to not snoop on your messages No, but I trust some nosy German guy at TU Whatever to spend hours poking at the assembly, find that hidden flag and proudly present it at 40C3. With enough eyeballs, all source is open (and AI will give us far more eyeballs than we have any idea what to do with). Sure, you can have different builds distributed to different people, but the NSA can also just do that with Signal, Signal being open source makes it that much easier. FDroid mitigates this somewhat, but it's not like the NSA can't get a fake TLS certificate for their domain and MITM your communications.
wongarsu 9mo ago
WhatsApp could exfiltrate messages at the ends. But I assume the trick lies in the word "default". Didn't Skype also default to end-to-end encryption, unless there was a server flag that disabled it for that specific user (I might be fuzzy on the details)
- londons_explore 9mo ago
  I don't trust un-auditable client applications... If you want to assure me your e2e is secure, there must be at least two clients implemented by different people, with at least one of them opensource. Whatsapp used to have this, but lately they have cracked down on third party clients.
  - rvnx 9mo ago
    Even if they have, this doesn't prevent from turning on a feature flag, or push an experimental build to some users.
    - londons_explore 9mo ago
      If there is a 2nd opensource client written by someone else, you would hope they would raise the alarm when asked to implement "feature flag 437 means send all the crypto keys to the server".
  - mschuster91 9mo ago
    > Whatsapp used to have this, but lately they have cracked down on third party clients. Blame spammers on that. The amount of scammers and spammers on Whatsapp is unreal.

4gotunameagain 9mo ago

Every encryption is end to end if you're not picky about the ends, or metadata. Do you trust facebook (excuse me, meta) to not snoop on your messages, and to not share them with the "intelligence" agencies ?

Fripplebubby 9mo ago
This is not true. The IETF draft is explicit that E2EE means that the message cannot be read by any party other than the sender and the intended receiver. When companies like Meta claim they support E2EE, this is what they claim. There are no tricky semantics or legalese at play here.
- monocasa 9mo ago
  To be fair zoom did claim E2EE, with one of the ends being their servers.
  - morpheuskafka 9mo ago
    Speaking of Zoom and encryption, its crazy that they bought Keybase (I think they basically said it was largely an acquihire) years ago, and have neither shut it down as everyone thought, nor materially changed it in any way. Unless they changed something it even gives 200GB cloud storage (KBFS) iirc.
- antonvs 9mo ago
  It's not entirely accurate to say "any party other than the sender and the intended receiver," since the messaging app running on the user's device can read the messages. Something like "any third party (other than the app vendor)" would be more accurate. Without actually analyze app behavior, it comes down to trusting that the vendor doesn't do anything nefarious.
  - rvnx 9mo ago
    As far as I remember, Google does the final signing of the APK, which is eventually the signature verified by the OS to verify if an update is valid or not. So Google can, if ordered or willing to help, create a new release track (e.g. experimental-do-not-deleted) and add specific e-mails to that track with the "improved" version. Nobody would be able to see that in real world, and you know what, if WhatsApp themselves are ordered, they can also create their own "test" track, it's just less covert but it would technically be working. In all cases, Google and Apple have to respect US laws, and the laws of earning money too. If you do not cooperative with intelligence / police services of your country, only bad things can happen.
    - mr_mitm 9mo ago
      Yes, the app could be compromised, or the OS, or the compiler of the app, or of the OS, or the OS of the compiler, or the CPU any of these things run on, etc. etc. None of that is relevant to the definition of E2EE.
      - antonvs 9mo ago
        It's relevant to how E2EE is described to users. Representing that it's not possible for anyone other than the sender or recipient to read messages is misleading and just incorrect in general. A particularly relevant point is when it comes to government interception. E.g. it would be perfectly possible for an messaging app to have a "wiretap mode" that the vendor enables for users that are the subject of a relevant warrant.
  - Fripplebubby 9mo ago
    I think the draft covers this well: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-knodel-e2ee-definition-04.html#name-end-to-end-principle-2 https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-knodel-e2ee-definition...
    - antonvs 9mo ago
      Technical drafts will tend to get this right, where the communication often breaks down is how it's communicated to users.
- rvnx 9mo ago
  > When companies like Meta claim they support E2EE, this is what they claim. Well, that statement can only resolve to true. These requests of data collection are perfectly legal. FBI DITU gives an order: give me all chats from *@banana.com and they receive banana.com. From there, two choices from the perspective of a tech provider: a) You accept. You get paid. You can always claim you had been coerced / are a victim, and that everything has been done by the law. b) You refuse. It's a crime. You take the risk to lose over 250K per day (!) in fines, some other court scandals that will come to you, some shady private stuff (what if we learn about your secret jacuzzi ?), harassement of the team, be publicly shamed that you supported terrorists who caused actual death of Americans, etc. In addition, nobody will know that you are the privacy hero and you are not even sure that the data is not exfiltrated another way. To this day, Apple, Facebook, Google still deny participating in illegal requests. They claim these were lawful requests, that have been carefully looked one-by-one. Yes, we looked carefully and decided we won't enjoy losing 100M USD and go to jail. The trick is that the identifier / wildcard can be very vague and wide. Or there can be multiple of them, each of them are narrow, but put one of top of the other they are super wide.
- jolmg 9mo ago
  Do companies that claim E2EE support face consequences if they don't abide by IETF's definition? Not like IETF governs them.
miki123211 9mo ago
> Do you trust facebook (excuse me, meta) to not snoop on your messages No, but I trust some nosy German guy at TU Whatever to spend hours poking at the assembly, find that hidden flag and proudly present it at 40C3. With enough eyeballs, all source is open (and AI will give us far more eyeballs than we have any idea what to do with). Sure, you can have different builds distributed to different people, but the NSA can also just do that with Signal, Signal being open source makes it that much easier. FDroid mitigates this somewhat, but it's not like the NSA can't get a fake TLS certificate for their domain and MITM your communications.

wongarsu 9mo ago

WhatsApp could exfiltrate messages at the ends. But I assume the trick lies in the word "default". Didn't Skype also default to end-to-end encryption, unless there was a server flag that disabled it for that specific user (I might be fuzzy on the details)

londons_explore 9mo ago
I don't trust un-auditable client applications... If you want to assure me your e2e is secure, there must be at least two clients implemented by different people, with at least one of them opensource. Whatsapp used to have this, but lately they have cracked down on third party clients.
- rvnx 9mo ago
  Even if they have, this doesn't prevent from turning on a feature flag, or push an experimental build to some users.
  - londons_explore 9mo ago
    If there is a 2nd opensource client written by someone else, you would hope they would raise the alarm when asked to implement "feature flag 437 means send all the crypto keys to the server".
- mschuster91 9mo ago
  > Whatsapp used to have this, but lately they have cracked down on third party clients. Blame spammers on that. The amount of scammers and spammers on Whatsapp is unreal.