8 ms·

US has investigated claims WhatsApp chats aren't private

• rambojohnson 9mo ago
  I mean no shit, right?
• cft 9mo ago
  I trust Telegram more: Putin never had any problems with Whatsapp, only with Telegram.
  • maqp 9mo ago
    No end-to-end encryption by default. WhatsApp has. No end-to-end encryption for groups. WhatsApp has. No end-to-end encryption on desktop. WhatsApp has. No break-in key-recovery. WhatsApp has. Inferring Telegram's security from public statements of *checks notes* former KGB officer and FSB director -- agencies that wrote majority of the literature in maskirovka, isn't exactly reliable, wouldn't you agree?
    • cft 9mo ago
      Telegram has private chats. I don't pay attention to his words, indeed. Way before the Ukrainian war, Russia had a massive campaign trying to block Telegram and they failed on a technical level. This has never happened with WhatsApp.
      • maqp 9mo ago
        Yeah it's really hard to block tally count of five IPs. https://telegramplayground.github.io/pyrogram/faq/what-are-the-ip-addresses-of-telegram-data-centers.html https://telegramplayground.github.io/pyrogram/faq/what-are-t... No wonder the great Russian firewall is struggling to keep TG at bay. Wake up.
        • cft 9mo ago
          >Yeah it's really hard to block tally count of five IPs. They blocked 16m IPs, to the extent that it started affecting the entire Russian's internet stability, and Telegram was still available there: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/russia-blocks-millions-of-ip-addresses-in-battle-against-telegram-app https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/17/russia-blocks-... >Wake up Is that a demand? A slogan? I wonder how much your own wokeness affects your ability to absorb facts.
          • maqp 9mo ago
            The server IPs are hard-coded into the Telegram client's source: https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/d7deedfa33ddfa51c72a5634d1f07ad2d7ad58a4/TMessagesProj/jni/tgnet/ConnectionsManager.cpp#L1814 https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram/blob/d7deedfa33ddfa51c72a5... You know you can just run $ git clone https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram.git https://github.com/DrKLO/Telegram.git && cd Telegram && FILE="TMessagesProj/jni/tgnet/ConnectionsManager.cpp" && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.175.50' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:b28:f23d:f001:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.167.51' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'95.161.76.100' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:67c:4e8:f002:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.175.100' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:b28:f23d:f003:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.167.91' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:67c:4e8:f004:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'149.154.171.5' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 && git log --reverse --format='%ad %h %s' --date=short -S'2001:b28:f23f:f005:0000:0000:0000:000a' -- "$FILE" | head -n 1 To get when the IPs first appeared, right? :D 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 2020-06-04 dceccae0b Update to 6.2.0 (1984) 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 2015-09-24 6bb7547f5 Update to 3.2.2 They've been the same IP addresses for ELEVEN years, and they precede the article you linked by THREE YEARS. They're not playing the catch-up with Russian government. Either Russian government is completely incompetent in that they're blocking 3,000,000 IP addresses and failing, or they are LYING about attempting to block it, which would indicate Telegram is a Russian op.
• OutOfHere 9mo ago
  The issue here is that WhatsApp doesn't work with third-party clients (outside of EU anyway). It does now in EU via BirdyChat and Haiket, but the features are too limiting: https://about.fb.com/news/2025/11/messaging-interoperability-whatsapp-enables-third-party-chats-for-users-in-europe/ https://about.fb.com/news/2025/11/messaging-interoperability... Ideally, WhatsApp would fully support third-party open-source clients that can ensure that the mathematics are used as intended.
• prakashn27 9mo ago
  Ex-WhatsApp engineer here. WhatsApp team makes so much effort to make this end to end encrypted messages possible. From the time I worked I know for sure it is not possible to read the encrypted messages. From business standpoint they don’t have to read these messages, since WhatsApp business API provide the necessary funding for the org as a whole.
  • blindriver 9mo ago
    It only takes one engineer in all the teams at Whatsapp that has different directives to make all your privacy work completely useless.
    • philipallstar 9mo ago
      Assuming there's no code review or audit, I suppose.
    • cactusfrog 9mo ago
      I would be surprised if the code was hidden from other people engineers.
      • maqp 9mo ago
        How are you hiding it from IDA pro though?
    • rustyhancock 9mo ago
      The legal and liability protection these messaging services get from E2EE is far too big to break it. Besides I get the feeling we're so cooked these days from marketing that when I get freaked out that an advert is what I was thinking about. It's probably because they made me think about it. Or maybe I need to update my meds?
    • dagmx 9mo ago
      How would you hide that? Unless you’re assuming nobody ever has to try and fix bugs or audit code to find it, and there’s some kind of closed off area of code that nobody thinks is suspicious. Or you maintain a complete second set of the app core libs that a few clandestine folks can access, and then hope nobody notices that the binaries don’t line up and crash logs are happening in obscured places.
• Ms-J 9mo ago
  This was slid off the first page of HN so quickly. As someone wisely pointed out in this thread, the reason Facebook is doing this is: "it's for favor trading and leverage at the highest levels."
  • CalRobert 9mo ago
    Just came here after seeing it in the Guardian and really disappointed it's not on the front page. Telling.
    • dang 9mo ago
      Telling in what way?
  • dang 9mo ago
    It set off the flamewar detector, which is the usual reason that happens. We'll either turn off that software penalty or merge the thread into a submission of the original Bloomberg source - these things take a bit of time to sort through! Edit: thread merged from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836487 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46836487 now.
    • Ms-J 9mo ago
      It does have an amplifying effect when issues such as this happen to where users who don't read in time won't see this due to the amount of other threads. Thank you for the insight as to why it happened.
• foooorsyth 9mo ago
  The reality that most encryption enthusiasts need to accept is that true E2EE where keys don’t leave on-device HSMs leads to terrible UX — your messages are bound to individual devices. You’re forced to do local backups. If you lose your phone, your important messages are gone. Lay users don’t like this and don’t want this, generally. Everything regarding encrypted messaging is downstream of the reality that it’s better for UX for the app developer to own the keys. Once developers have the keys, they’re going to be compelled by governments to provide them when warrants are issued. Force and violence, not mathematical proofs, are the ultimate authority. It’s fun to get into the “conspiratorial” discussions, like where the P-256 curve constants came from or whether the HSMs have backdoors. Ultimately, none of that stuff matters. Users don’t want their messages to go poof when their phone breaks, and governments will compel you to change whatever bulletproof architecture you have to better serve their warrants.
• webdoodle 9mo ago
  > US reportedly investigate claims that Meta can read encrypted WhatsApp messages Lol, Fox guarding the hen house.
• sailfast 9mo ago
  “Fox has investigated whether henhouse is secure” News at 11.
• moffers 9mo ago
  I feel fairly confident an oddly-shaped donation from Mark Z’s foundation will make this go away.
  • Kiboneu 9mo ago
    I'd bet that shape would look like a tube with a cap on.
• coppsilgold 9mo ago
  No closed-source E2EE client can be truly secure because the ends of e2e are opaque. Detecting backdoors is only truly feasible with open source software and even then it can difficult. A backdoor can be a subtle remote code execution "vulnerability" that can only be exploited by the server. If used carefully and it exfiltrates data in expected client-server communications it can be all but impossible to detect. This approach also makes it more likely that almost no insider will even be aware of it, it could be a small patch applied during the build process or to the binary itself (for example, a bound check branch). This is also another reason why reproducible builds are a good idea for open source software.
  • TZubiri 9mo ago
    With all due respect to Stallman, you can actually study binaries. The claim Stallman would make (after punishing you for using Open Source instead of Free Software for an hour) is that Closed Software (Proprietary Software) is unjust. but in the context of security, the claim would be limited to Free Software being capable of being secure too. You may be able to argue that Open Source reduces risk in threat models where the manufacturer is the attacker, but in any other threat model, security is an advantage of closed source. It's automatic obfuscation. There's a lot of advantages to Free Software, you don't need to make up some.
    • refulgentis 9mo ago
      This comment comes across as unnecessarily aggressive and out of nowhere (Stallman?), it's really hard to parse. Does this rewording reflect it's meaning? "You don't actually need code to evaluate security, you can analyze a binary just as well." Because that doesn't sound correct? But that's just my first pass, at a high level. Don't wanna overinterpret until I'm on surer ground about what the dispute is. (i.e. don't want to mind read :) ) Steelman for my current understanding is limited to "you can check if it writes files/accesses network, and if it doesn't, then by definition the chats are private and its secure", which sounds facile. (presumably something is being written to somewhere for the whole chat thing to work, can't do P2P because someone's app might not be open when you send)
• ubermonkey 9mo ago
  WhatsApp belongs to Meta. Why would anyone believe those chats are private?
• hn_user_9876 9mo ago
  [dead]
• philipwhiuk 9mo ago
  Frankly the wrench-attack is easier.
• bredren 9mo ago
  I co-founded Gliph, which was one of the first commercial, cross platform messaging apps to provide end to end encrypt. One area of exposure was push notifications. I wonder if the access described wasn’t to the messages themselves but content rich notifications. If so, both parties could be ~correct. Except the contractors would have been seeing what is technically metadata.
  • tptacek 9mo ago
    I'm unfamiliar with Gliph. What were the protocols/constructions you used?
• abcd_f 9mo ago
  I witnessed something recently that points unambiguously at Whatsapp chats being not private. Not two months ago I sent a single photo to a friend of some random MacGyver kitchen contraption I made. Never described it, just a photo with the lol. He replied lol. He never reshared nor discussed it with anyone else. We never spoke about this before or after. Two days later he starts seeing ads on Facebook for a proper version of the same. There's virtually no other explanation except for Meta vacuuming and analyzing the photo. None.
  • Hackbraten 9mo ago
    It takes more than two days to develop and roll out a new product. That goes for kitchen appliances, too.
    • jokersarewild 9mo ago
      I don't think the claim was that the commercial device never existed but that it was too obscure for the friend to randomly independently get targeted ads about it.. But I don't think WhatsApp takes many steps to protect media and in many cases the user really wants to backup media or share in other apps, etc, over security for media.
  • halapro 9mo ago
    Machines are really good at putting two and two together and humans are generally not. Are both of you completely sure that you didn't google anything related to the image before or after? While Meta doesn't have access to the contents, they do know who you're texting and when.
• cedws 9mo ago
  I said this in another recent HN thread but all encryption comes down to key management. If you don’t control the keys, something else does. Sometimes that’s a hardware enclave, sometimes it’s a key derivation algorithm, sometimes it’s just a locally generated key on the filesystem. If you never give WhatsApp a cryptographic identity then what key is it using? How are your messages seamlessly showing up on another device when you authenticate? It’s not magic, and these convenience features always weaken the crypto in some way. WhatsApp has a feature to verify the fingerprint of another party. How many people do you think use this feature, versus how many people just assume they're safe because they read that WhatsApp has E2EE?
• snowwrestler 9mo ago
  For context, the U.S. is also currently investigating whether Donald Trump actually won the 2020 presidential election (he didn’t), whether aspirin causes autism (it doesn’t), and whether transgenic research is woke (it’s not). “The U.S. investigates” unfortunately does not mean as much as it used to. That said, I would rest easy in the knowledge that someone deep in the NSA already knows with absolute certainty whether the WhatsApp client app is doing anything weird. But they’re not likely to talk to a reporter or plaintiffs lawyer.
• m3kw9 9mo ago
  yes/no? Can't they just say that?
• 31337Logic 9mo ago
  Thank God for Signal. And by God I mean all the smart men and women who made Signal possible. Not God. God didn't do shit. As usual.
• roenxi 9mo ago
  It is a bit counter-intuitive because there'd be law enforcement lobby working very hard to make sure that they can read private WhatsApp chats. I don't think it is reasonable to treat the entity that literally runs a spy agency monitoring all digital communication as the arbiter and investigator of what is and isn't private. The incentives just aren't there.
• sirpilade 9mo ago
  Is anybody using any open source, self-hosted solution with an UI on par to whatsapp? Asking for my wife
  • meatmanek 9mo ago
    Matrix exists and really isn't too bad to self-host if you just want a small number of people. (If you federate with other servers, then you have more things to worry about -- increased attack surface, more visibility leading to more potential attackers, and the risk of unintentionally storing illegal content (e.g. CSAM) sent by people from other servers.) The UI of Element (the most popular Matrix client) is more or less in line with any other chat app, but I guess it depends what you mean by "on par to whatsapp". Biggest downside I've found is that you can't search your messages on the mobile clients.
• hedora 9mo ago
  None of the statements I’ve seen from Meta, people formerly involved in WhatsApp that chimed in here (thanks!), or the quotes from the investigation are incompatible with the whistleblowers’ allegations. At this point, I won’t trust anything short of this on the front page of an SEC filing, signed by zuck and the relevant management chain: “The following statement is material to earnings: Facebook has never (since E2EE was rolled out) and will never access messages sent through whatsapp via any means including the encryption protocol, application backdoor moderation access or backup mechanisms. Similarly, it does not provide third parties with access to the methods, and does not have the technical capability to do so under any circumstances.”
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• rippeltippel 9mo ago
  When I pair a new device in Signal, or change my phone number, I cannot see my any previous messages. However, in WhatsApp I can. As I understand it, that's a security weak spot with WhatsApp, that could (in theory) allow Meta read users messages. Is it the case?
• jqpabc123 9mo ago
  Long story short, the world's largest privacy invaders have every incentive to subvert your privacy. They do this at every opportunity. It's their bread and butter. It's how they make money. The only reasonable assumption when dealing with them is that your privacy is being compromised. Proving it may not be possible but the incentive alone should be enough to convince a reasonable person that they do not deserve trust.
• HocusLocus 9mo ago
  predatory unscrollable website. Most expensive fail in history.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• ralusek 9mo ago
  I mean at the very least if their clients can read it then they can at least read it through their clients, right? And if their clients can read it’ll be because of some private key stored on the client device that they must be able to access, so they could always get that. And this is just assuming that they’ve been transparent about how it’s built, they could just have backdoors on their end.
  • basch 9mo ago
    they can also just .. brute force passwords. the pin to encrypt fb messenger chat is 6 digits for example.
    • farbklang 9mo ago
      but that is a pin and can be rate limited / denied, not a cryptograhpic key that can be used to brute force and compare hash generations (?)
      • barbazoo 9mo ago
        They likely wouldn’t rate limit themselves, rate limiting only applies when you access through their cute little enter your pin UI.
        • solenoid0937 9mo ago
          The PIN is used when you're too lazy to set an alphanumeric pin or offload the backup to Apple/Google. Now sure, this is most people, but such are the foibles of E2EE - getting E2EE "right" (eg supporting account recovery) requires people to memorize a complex password. The PIN interface is also an HSM on the backend. The HSM performs the rate limiting. So they'd need a backdoor'd HSM.
          • basch 9mo ago
            That might be a different pin? Messenger requires a pin to be able to access encrypted chat. Every time you sign in to the web interface or resign into the app you enter it. I don’t remember an option for an alphanumeric pin or to offload it to a third party.
• mrtksn 9mo ago
  I wonder how these investigations go? Are they just asking them if it is true? Are they working with IT specialist to technically analyze the apps? Are they requesting the source code that can be demonstrated to be the same one that runs on the user devices and then analyze that code?
  • TZubiri 9mo ago
    Anyone can audit the client binaries
  • mattmaroon 9mo ago
    That will be step 1. Fear of being caught lying to the government is such that that is usually enough. Presumably at least a handful of people would have to know about it, and nobody likes their job at Facebook enough to go to jail over it. But you never know.
    • hsuduebc2 9mo ago
      Companies lie to governments and the public all the time. I doubt that even if something were found and the case were lost, it would lead to prison or any truly severe punishment. No money was stolen and no lives were put at risk. At worst, it would likely end in a fine, and then it would be forgotten, especially given Meta’s repeated violations of user trust. The reality is that most users do not seem to care. For many, WhatsApp is simply “free SMS,” tied to a phone number, so it feels familiar and easy to understand, and the broader implications are ignored.
      • mattmaroon 9mo ago
        Martha Stewart went to jail for lying to the government. The fact that there would be no punishment is why they would tell the truth. The government is pretty harsh when they find out you lied under oath. Corporate officers do not lie to the government frequently.
  • RenThraysk 9mo ago
    Multiple governments will already know as they have analyzed and reverse engineered it.
• Ms-J 9mo ago
  Who do they expect to fall for the claims that a Facebook owned messenger couldn't read your "encrypted" messages? It's truly funny. Any large scale provider with headquarters in the USA will be subject to backdoors and information sharing with the government when they want to read or know what you are doing.
  • mattmaroon 9mo ago
    I think you can safely remove “in the USA” from that sentence.
  • hsuduebc2 9mo ago
    I do not believe them either. The swift start of the investigation by U.S. authorities only suggests there was no obstacle to opening one, not that nothing could be found. By “could not,” I mean it is not currently possible to confirm, not that there is necessarily nothing there. Personally, I would never trust anyone big enough that it(in this case Meta) need and want to be deeply entangled in politics.
  • kgwxd 9mo ago
    They're only concerned someone at meta, they don't already control, could read their personal messages.
  • huijzer 9mo ago
    I have reached the point that I think even the chat control discussion might be a distraction because essentially they can already get anything. Yeah government needs to fill in a form to request, but that’s mostly automated I believe
    • j45 9mo ago
      Such initiatives are likely trying to make it easier.
    • gruez 9mo ago
      >I have reached the point that I think even the chat control discussion might be a distraction because essentially they can already get anything. Then why are politicians wasting time and attracting ire attempting pushing it through? Same goes for UK demanding backdoors. If they already have it, why start a big public fight over it?
• david_allison 9mo ago
  It was my understanding that the backups are unencrypted. Is that still the case?
  • evanjrowley 9mo ago
    On Android, if you allow it to backup to your Google cloud storage, it will say the backups are encrypted. That was my experience when I set it up a few weeks ago. Exactly who has the ability to decrypt the backup is not totally clear. It may be a different situation for non-Android users, Android users who are not signed in with a Google account, Android users who are not using Google Play Services, etc.
    • bayindirh 9mo ago
      You can explore your Google Cloud's Application Storage part via Rsync, AFAIK. So you can see whether your backups are encrypted or not. I remember that you had to extract at least two keys from the android device to be able to read "on-device" chat storage in the days of yore, so the tech is there. If you don't have the keys' copies in the Google Drive side, we can say that they are at least "superficially" encrypted.
• londons_explore 9mo ago
  I want whatsapp to decrypt the messages in a secure enclave and render the message content to the screen with a secure rendering pipeline, as is done with DRM'ed video. Compromise of the client side application or OS shouldn't break the security model. This should be possible with current API's, since each message could if needed simply be a single frame DRM'ed video if no better approach exists (or until a better approach is built).
  • rsync 9mo ago
    “I want whatsapp to decrypt the messages in a secure enclave and render the message content to the screen with a secure rendering pipeline, as is done with DRM'ed video.“ If you are sophisticated enough to understand, and want, these things (and I believe that you are) … … then why would you want to use WhatsApp in the first place?
    • londons_explore 9mo ago
      Because my goal isn't to have my communication secure - but to have everyone's communication secure. And the network effect of whatsapp (3 billion users) seems currently the best route to that.
  • Retr0id 9mo ago
    Signal uses the DRM APIs to mitigate threats like Microsoft Recall, but it doesn't stop the app itself from reading its own data. I don't really see how it's possible to mitigate client compromise. You can decrypt stuff on a secure enclave but at some point the client has to pull it out and render it.
    • maqp 9mo ago
      >I don't really see how it's possible to mitigate client compromise. You could of course offload plaintext input and output along with cryptographic operations and key management to separate devices that interact with the networked device unidirectionally over hardware data diodes, that prevent malware from getting in or getting the keys out. Throw in some v3 Onion Services for p2p ciphertext routing, and decent ciphersuite and you've successfully made it to at least three watch lists just by reading this. Anyway, here's one I made earlier https://github.com/maqp/tfc https://github.com/maqp/tfc
• znpy 9mo ago
  I always assumed this to be true, to be honest. Nowadays all of the messaging pipeline on my phone is closed source and proprietary, and thus unverifiable at all. The iPhone operating system is closed, the runtime is closed, the whatsapp client is closed, the protocol is closed… hard to believe any claim. And i know that somebody’s gonna bring up the alleged e2e encryption… a client in control of somebody else might just leak the encryption keys from one end of the chat. Closed systems that do not support third party clients that connect through open protocols should ALWAYS be assumed to be insecure.
  • gruez 9mo ago
    >Closed systems that do not support third party clients that connect through open protocols should ALWAYS be assumed to be insecure. So you're posting this from an open core CPU running on an open FPGA that you fabricated yourself, right? Or is this just a game of one-upmanship where people come with increasingly high standards for what counts as "secure" to signal how devoted to security they are?
    • znpy 9mo ago
      Nah, i just accept stuff can be intercepted. Life is about pragmatism.
  • solenoid0937 9mo ago
    it doesn't need to be open source for us to know what it's doing. its properties are well understood by the security community because it's been RE'd. > a client in control of somebody else might just leak the encryption keys from one end of the chat. has nothing to do with closed/open source. preventing this requires remote attestation. i don't know of any messaging app out there that really does this, closed or open source. also, ironically remote attestation is the antithesis of open source.
• josefrichter 9mo ago
  I am not into conspiracy theories, but I find it very unlikely that our governments can’t read all our messages across platforms.
• miohtama 9mo ago
  Both things cannot be true at the same time - WhatsApp encryption is broken - EU's and UK's Chat Control spooks demand Meta to insert backdoor because they cannot break the encryption The Guardian has its own editorial flavour on tech news, so expect them to use any excuse to bash the subject.
  • dyauspitr 9mo ago
    They’re just not sharing the back door with the EU?
  • Retric 9mo ago
    Just because Adam has a back door doesn’t mean Eve also has a back door.
  • preisschild 9mo ago
    > EU's and UK's Chat Control spooks demand Meta to insert backdoor because they cannot break the encryption Those are not law, so no the EU doesnt demand that
• cosmicgadget 9mo ago
  > “We look forward to moving forward with those claims and note WhatsApp’s denials have all been carefully worded in a way that stops short of denying the central allegation in the complaint – that Meta has the ability to read WhatsApp messages, regardless of its claims about end-to-end encryption.” My money is on the chats being end to end encrypted and separately uploaded to Facebook.
  • RajT88 9mo ago
    Facebook messenger similarly claims to be end to end encrypted, and yet if it thinks you are sending a link to a pirate site, it "fails to send". I imagine there are a great many blacklisted sites which they shadow block, despite "not being able to read your messages". My pet conspiracy theory is that the "backup code" which "restores" encrypted messages is there to annoy you into installing the app instead of chatting on the web.
    • loeg 9mo ago
      The client probably just downloads a blacklist of banned domains. That doesn't mean messages that are sent are not E2E encrypted.
      • RajT88 9mo ago
        Facebook has lost any benefit of doubt, imo.
        • loeg 9mo ago
          Baseless conspiracy theories just make yourself dumber; it doesn’t punish Facebook.
  • random3 9mo ago
    That’s because they have such a good track record wrt to privacy? https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_District_Court/3--20-cv-08570/Klein_et_al_v._Meta_Platforms_Inc/docs/885.pdf https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/California_Northern_Distri...
• calibas 9mo ago
  It's vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, and the man-in-the-middle happens to be Meta. The tricky part would be doing it and not getting caught though.
• oldestofsports 9mo ago
  Surprised pikachu face
• oefrha 9mo ago
  I always assumed Meta has backdoor that at least allows them to compromise key individuals if men in black ask, but law firm representing NSO courageously defending the people? Come the fuck on. > Our colleagues’ defence of NSO on appeal has nothing to do with the facts disclosed to us and which form the basis of the lawsuit we brought for worldwide WhatsApp users.
  • zugi 9mo ago
    > I always assumed Meta has backdoor that at least allows them to compromise key individuals if men in black ask According to Meta's own voluntarily published official statements, they do not. * FAQ on encryption: https://faq.whatsapp.com/820124435853543 https://faq.whatsapp.com/820124435853543 * FAQ for law enforcement: https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967 https://faq.whatsapp.com/444002211197967 These representations are legally binding. If Meta were intentionally lying on these, it would invite billions of dollars of liability. They use similar terminology as Signal and the best private VPN companies: we can't read and don't retain message content, so law enforcement can't ask for it. They do keep some "meta" information and will provide it with a valid subpoenoa. The latter link even clarifies Meta's interpretation of their responsibilities under "National Security Letters", which the US Government has tried to use to circumvent 4th amendment protections in the past: > We interpret the national security letter provision as applied to WhatsApp to require the production of only two categories of information: name and length of service. I guess we'll see if this lawsuit goes anywhere or discovery reveals anything surprising.
• renegade-otter 9mo ago
  Anyone trusting Facebook to follow basic human decency and, yes, laws, is a fool.
  • dang 9mo ago
    Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We're trying for something different here.
    • renegade-otter 9mo ago
      Point taken, but I feel like going into details at this stage is redundant. There have been probably hundreds of discussions on this site regarding this topic. Books have been written about Facebook's and Zuckerberg's absent moral compass. To wit, from three days ago: https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-rejected-turn-off-switch-for-teen-ai-chatbots-lawsuit-alleges/ar-AA1Vavum https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/meta-ceo-mark-zuckerber... "While Zuckerberg reportedly wanted to prevent "explicit" conversations with younger teens, a February 2024 meeting summary shows he believed Meta should be "less restrictive than proposed" and wanted to "allow adults to engage in racier conversation on topics like sex." He also rejected parental controls that would have let families disable the AI feature entirely. Nick Clegg, Meta's former head of global policy, questioned the approach in internal emails, asking if the company really wanted these products "known for" sexual interactions with teens, warning of "inevitable societal backlash."
      • dang 9mo ago
        Let's assume you're right that going into details is redundant. In that case, however, so is the generic putdown. Put differently: even if you don't owe megacorps that don't follow basic human decency better, you owe this community better if you're participating in it. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      • Revolution1120 9mo ago
        Over a decade ago, when Facebook held a monopoly, having one's first sexual experience at age 12 or even earlier was an incredibly prestigious and fashionable thing. If Zuckerberg truly held this view, it wouldn't be surprising at all; it would even be considered perfectly reasonable. And those who want to censor these things aren't leftists, but genuine conservatives. Despite the efforts of Musk and other Silicon Valley figures to distort the definition of conservative through their propaganda, and even with many people having short memories, their lies are easily exposed. Unless "having sex at age 12" is a long-standing American traditional value, it's no closer to conservatism than the so-called Muslim immigrants. Looking back now, the propaganda advocating for sex at age 12 may very well have been a carefully orchestrated global pedophile ideology infiltration by elite pedophiles of Epstein's class. It wasn't limited to the Americas or Europe; it was also widespread and accepted in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. After Epstein's death in 2019, has such propaganda decreased significantly? Is this a coincidence? It's very likely not a coincidence. This argument is worth exploring; following this line of thought might uncover even more valuable research on field of deep state. While Epstein was a billionaire, he wasn't exceptionally wealthy on paper and shouldn't have possessed such immense influence and control. Therefore, there's only one possibility is profound: Epstein was Satoshi Nakamoto!
• xvector 9mo ago
  What even are these low effort, uninformed conspiratorial comments saturating the comment section? Sure, Meta can obviously read encrypted messages in certain scenarios: - you report a chat (you're just uploading the plaintext) - you turn on their AI bot (inference runs on their GPUs) Otherwise they cannot read anything. The app uses the same encryption protocol as Signal and it's been extensively reverse engineered. Hell, they worked with Moxie's team to get this done (https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/). The burden of proof is on anyone that claims Meta bypassing encryption is "obviously the case." I am really tired of HN devolving into angry uninformed hot takes and quips.
• AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
  If your personal threat model at this point is not literally: “everything I ever do can be used against me in court” …then you are not up-to-date with the latest state of society Privacy is the most relevant when you are in a position where that information is the difference between your life or your death The average person going through their average day breaks dozens of laws because the world is a Kafkaesque surveillance capitalist society. The amount of information that exists about there average consumer is so unbelievably godly such that any litigator could make an argument against nearly any human on the planet that they are in violation of something if there is enough pressure If you think you’re safe in this society because you “don’t do anything wrong“ then you’re compromised and don’t even realize it
• jijji 9mo ago
  if anybody believes that Facebook would allow people to send a totally encrypted message to somebody, they're out of their mind. they're pretty much in bed with law enforcement at this point. I mean I don't know how many people have been killed in Saudi Arabia this year for writing Facebook messages to each other that were against what the government wanted but it's probably a large number.
  • xvector 9mo ago
    This reads like another low effort conspiratorial comment. WhatsApp has been reverse engineered extensively, they worked with Moxie's team to implement the same protocol as Signal, and you can freely inspect the client binaries yourself! If you're confident this is the case, you should provide a comment with actual technical substance backing your claims.
• kachapopopow 9mo ago
  yes, this is a very known fact that it is not E2EE but Client2Server Encrypted. Otherwise your message history wouldn't work.
  • kachapopopow 9mo ago
    I guess I owe a clarification: Otherwise your message history wouldn't be available the moment you log in with your credentials*.
  • codexetreme 9mo ago
    Might be a rookie question. But exactly why would chat history not work?
    • ryanscio 9mo ago
      It would, just not on new devices without moving keys via already-trusted device. This is what WhatsApp presumably does
      • kachapopopow 9mo ago
        That's the thing, it does not and it has been known that it does not do this. The keys are stored on the server and the server sends them to your device on login. They do have some kind of machine-id encoded in it, but that is just for show.
  • xvector 9mo ago
    This is a total misunderstanding of how E2EE works. I need to either enter my password or let the app access my iCloud Keychain to let it derive the backup encryption key. It's also well known that they worked with the Moxie's team to implement the same E2EE protocol as Signal. So messages are E2EE as well.
    • kachapopopow 9mo ago
      I can sign in from my apple device to my android device purely using my credentials so as far as I know it is just for show.
• alex1138 9mo ago
  Zuck didn't buy it in good faith. It wasn't "we'll grow you big by using our resources but be absolutely faithful to the privacy terms you dictate". Evidence: Brian Acton very publically telling people that they (Zuck, possibly Sandberg) reneged Zuck thinks we're "dumb fucks". That's his internet legacy. Copying products, buying them up, wiping out competition
• timpera 9mo ago
  Lots of uninformed conspiratorial comments with zero proof in here, but I'd really like WhatsApp to get their encryption audited by a reliable, independent 3rd party.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• nindalf 9mo ago
  This reads like a nothingburger. Couple of quotes from the article: > the idea that WhatsApp can selectively and retroactively access the content of [end-to-end encrypted] individual chats is a mathematical impossibility > Steven Murdoch, professor of security engineering at UCL, said the lawsuit was “a bit strange”. “It seems to be going mostly on whistleblowers, and we don’t know much about them or their credibility,” he said. “I would be very surprised if what they are claiming is actually true.” No one apart from the firm filing the lawsuit is actually supporting this claim. A lot of people in this thread seem very confident that it's true, and I'm not sure what precisely makes them so confident.
  • Snoozus 9mo ago
    I find this wording also "a bit strange". It is not a mathematical impossibility in any way. For example they might be able to read the backups, the keys might be somehow (accidentaly or not) leaked... And then the part about Telegram not having end2end encryption? What's this all about?
    • FabHK 9mo ago
      Telegram defaults to not e2ee; you have to initiate a "secret" chat to get e2ee.
• modeless 9mo ago
  Meanwhile Apple has always been able to read encrypted iMessage messages and everyone decided to ignore that fact. https://james.darpinian.com/blog/apple-imessage-encryption https://james.darpinian.com/blog/apple-imessage-encryption
  • gruez 9mo ago
    >has always been able to read encrypted iMessage messages ...assuming you have icloud backups enabled, which is... totally expected? What's next, complaining about bitlocker being backdoored because microsoft can read your onedrive files?
    • modeless 9mo ago
      If you read the link you would know that contrary to your expectation other apps advertising E2EE such as Google's Messages app don't allow the app maker to read your messages from your backups. And turning off backups doesn't help when everyone else has them enabled. Apple doesn't respect your backup settings on other people's accounts. Again, other apps address this problem in various ways, but not iMessage.
      • deleted 9mo ago
        [deleted]
      • gruez 9mo ago
        >If you read the link you would know that contrary to your expectation other apps advertising E2EE don't allow the app maker to read your messages. What does that even mean? Suppose icloud backups doesn't exist, but you could still take screenshots and save them to icloud drive. Is that also "Apple has always been able to read encrypted iMessage messages"? Same goes for "other people having icloud backups enabled". People can also snitch on you, or get their phones seized. I feel like people like you and the article author are just redefining the threat model of E2EE apps just so they can smugly go "well ackshually..."
        • 9mo ago
• oncallthrow 9mo ago
  This should surprise nobody. Do you really think that the intelligence agencies of the US etc would allow mainstream E2E encryption? Please stop being so naive
• vbezhenar 9mo ago
  Whatsapp is considered insecure and banned from use for military in Russia. Telegram, on the other hand, is widely used. Of course that's not something definitive, but just a food for thought.
  • vimda 9mo ago
    Telegram which famously didn't have _any_ end to end encryption for ages, and even now only has very limited opt-in "secret chats"?
    • vbezhenar 9mo ago
      I'm not going to promote Telegram, just wanted to highlight that Whatsapp is not considered trustworthy by a geopolitical enemy of US. I don't think that Telegram is bad, and when your life depends on it, you can click "Secret Chat" button, it's not a big deal.
    • maqp 9mo ago
      Yeah Telegram only has 1:1 opt-in E2EE, that you can't use across your devices, so either you or your buddy quickly gets tired of whipping out their phone when they're sitting at their laptop, and just replies you through Telegram's non-E2EE cloud chats, and that's the backdoor. The user activated it. It's "their fault".
  • gruez 9mo ago
    > but just a food for thought. ...that telegram is backdoored by the russians? The implication you're trying to make seems to be that russians must be choosing telegram because it's secure, but are ignoring the possibility that they're choosing telegram because they have access to it. After all, you think they want the possibility of their military scheming against them?
    • p1anecrazy 9mo ago
      I guess their point was that Russian military doesn‘t care if Russian intelligence reads their messages
• youknownothing 9mo ago
  Just to throw in a couple of possibly outlandish theories: 1. as others have said, they could be collecting the encrypted messages and then tried to decrypt them using quantum computing, the Chinese have been reportedly trying to do this for many years now. 2. with metadata and all the information from other sources, they could infer what the conversation is about without the need to decrypt it: if I visit a page (Facebook cookies, they know), then I share a message to my friend John, and then John visits the same page (again, cookies), then they can be pretty certain that the contain of the message was me sharing the link.
  • instagib 9mo ago
    2) enough metadata can reveal a person's life, habits, and location which removes the need to analyze the actual bulky content of communications. can analyze receivers data or receivers contact trees data which is easier to access. The number of free or paid data sources is daunting.
  • petcat 9mo ago
    I think this is the most likely scenario. The US government is not necessarily trying to read the messages right now, in real-time. But it wants to read the messages at some point in the future. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
  • NoImmatureAdHom 9mo ago
    It's the backups. The backups aren't encrypted such that only the end-user has the key.
  • wasabi991011 9mo ago
    Re. quantum computing: no chance, the scientific and engineering breakthroughs they would need are too outlandish, like claiming China already had a 2026-level frontier model back in 2016.
  • solenoid0937 9mo ago
    (1) made me chuckle. I've worked at nearly every FAANG including Meta. These companies aren't nearly as advanced or competent as you think. I no longer work at Meta, but in my mind a more likely scenario than (1) is: a senior engineer proposes a 'Decryption at Scale' framework solely to secure their E6 promo, and writes a 40-page Google Doc to farm 'direction' points for PSC. Five PMs repost this on Workplace to celebrate the "alignment" so they can also include it in their PSCs. The TL and PMs immediately abandon the project after ratings are locked because they already farmed the credit for it. The actual implementation gets assigned to an E4 bootcamp grad who is told by a non-technical EM to pivot 3 months in because it doesn't look like 'measurable impact' in a perf packet. The E4 gets fired to fill the layoff quota and everyone else sails off into the sunset.
• ohcmon 9mo ago
  Next time you use true real independently audited e2e communication channel, don’t forget to check who is the authority who says that the "other end" is "the end" you think it is
• SirFatty 9mo ago
  Of course they can. Why wouldn't you assume this to be the case?
• 0x_rs 9mo ago
  It's a proprietary, closed-source application. It can do whatever it wants, and it doesn't even need to "backdoor" encryption when all it has to do is just forward everything matching some criteria to their servers (and by extension anyone they comply to). It's always one update away from dumping your entire chat history into a remote bucket, and it would still not be in contradiction with their promise of E2EE. Furthermore, it already has the functionality to send messages when reporting [0]. Facebook's Messenger also has worked that way for years. [1] There were also rumors the on-device scanning practice would be expanded to comply with surveillance proposals such as ChatControl a couple years ago. This doesn't mean it's spying on each and every message now, but it would have potential to do so and it would be feasible today more than ever before, hence the importance of software the average person can trust and isn't as easily subject to their government's tantrums about privacy. 0. https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-privacy-protections-for-its-2-billion-whatsapp-users https://www.propublica.org/article/how-facebook-undermines-p... 1. https://archive.is/fe6zY https://archive.is/fe6zY
  • paxys 9mo ago
    You are also using proprietary, closed-source hardware and operating system underneath the app that can do whatever they want. This line of reasoning ultimately leads to - unless you craft every atom and every bit yourself your data isn't secure. Which may be true, but is a pointless discussion.
    • OutOfHere 9mo ago
      That's a bad take because the vendors there are different; they're not Meta. As such, it's not pointless.
    • threatofrain 9mo ago
      No it means you calculate how much risk you're taking on, vendor by vendor. Do all companies have the same reputation before your eyes?
      • bigyabai 9mo ago
• hiprob 9mo ago
  I know the default assumption with Telegram is that they can read all your messages, but unlike WhatsApp they seem less cooperative and I never got the notion that they ever read private messages until the Macron incident, and even then they do if the other party reports them. How come they are able to be this exception despite not having end to end encryption by default?
  • maqp 9mo ago
    >I know the default assumption with Telegram is that they can read all your messages The client is open source. It's trivial to verify this is 100% factually happening. They have access to every group message. Every desktop message. Every message by default. If you enable secret chats for 1:1 mobile chats, you are now disclosing to Telegram you're actively trying to hide something from them, and if there ever was metadata worth it for Keith Alexander to kill someone over, it's that. >they seem less cooperative and I never got the notion that they ever read private messages until the Macron incident We have no way to verify Telegram isn't a Russian OP. I'd love to say Pavel Durov fled for his life into exile https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/technology/once-celebrated-in-russia-programmer-pavel-durov-chooses-exile.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/technology/once-celebrate... But the "fugitive" has since visited Russia over SIXTY times https://kyivindependent.com/kremlingram-investigation-durov/ https://kyivindependent.com/kremlingram-investigation-durov/ Thus, I wouldn't be as much concerned about what they're handing EUROPOL, but what they're handing FSB/SVR. Even if Telegram never co-operated with Russian intelligence, who here thinks Telegram team, that can't pull off the basic thing of "make everything E2EE" that ~all of its competition has successfully done, can harden their servers against Russian state sponsored hackers like Fancy Bear, who obviously would never make noise about successful breach and data exfiltration. >How come they are able to be this exception despite not having end to end encryption by default? They've pushed out lie about storing cloud chats across different servers in different jurisdictions. Maybe that scared some prosecutors off. Or maybe FVEY is inside TG's servers too, and they don't like the idea of going after users as that would incentivize deployment of usable E2EE. Who knows. Just use Signal.
    • hiprob 9mo ago
• lukeschlather 9mo ago
  It seems obvious that they can. It's my understanding for FB Messenger that the private key is stored encrypted with a key that is derived from the user's password. So it's not straightforward, but Meta is obviously in a position to grab the user's password when they authenticate and obtain their private key. This would probably leave traces, but someone working with company authorization could probably do it. For WhatsApp they claim it is like Signal, with the caveat that if you have backups enabled it works like Messenger. Although interestingly if you have backups enabled the key may be stored with Apple/Google rather than Meta, it might be the case that with backup enabled your phone vendor can read your WhatsApp messages but Facebook cannot.
• martinralbrecht 9mo ago
  WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption has been independently investigated: https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/files/324396471/whatsapp.pdf https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/ws/files/324396471/whatsapp.pdf Full version here: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/794.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/794.pdf We didn't review the entire source code, only the cryptographic core. That said, the main issue we found was that the WhatsApp servers ultimately decide who is and isn't in a particular chat. Dan Goodin wrote about it here: https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/05/whatsapp-provides-no-cryptographic-management-for-group-messages/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2025/05/whatsapp-provides-n...
  • vpShane 9mo ago
    > We didn't review the entire source code And, you don't see the issue with that? Facebook was bypassing security measures for mobile by sending data to itself on localhost using websockets and webrtc. https://cybersecuritynews.com/track-android-users-covertly/ https://cybersecuritynews.com/track-android-users-covertly/ An audit of 'they can't read it cryptographically' but the app can read it, and the app sends data in all directions. Push notifications can be used to read messages.
    • miduil 9mo ago
      > Push notifications can be used to read messages. Are you trying to imply that WhatsApp is bypassing e2e messaging through Push notifications? Unless something has changed, this table highlights that both Signal and WhatsApp are using a "Push-to-Sync" technique to notify about new messages. https://crysp.petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0151.pdf https://crysp.petsymposium.org/popets/2024/popets-2024-0151....
      • itsthecourier 9mo ago
        Push-to-Sync. We observed 8 apps employ a push-to-sync strat- egy to prevent privacy leakage to Google via FCM. In this mitigation strategy, apps send an empty (or almost empty) push notification to FCM. Some apps, such as Signal, send a push notification with no data (aside from the fields that Google sets; see Figure 4). Other apps may send an identifier (including, in some cases, a phone num- ber). This push notification tells the app to query the app server for data, the data is retrieved securely by the app, and then a push notification is populated on the client side with the unencrypted data. In these cases, the only metadata that FCM receives is that the user received some message or messages, and when that push noti- fication was issued. Achieving this requires sending an additional network request to the app server to fetch the data and keeping track of identifiers used to correlate the push notification received on the user device with the message on the app server.
• solenoid0937 9mo ago
  So many people that strongly believe WhatsApp isn't E2EE! Quick, someone set up a Kalshi or Polymarket or whatever claiming that WhatsApp isn't E2EE. I'll gladly bet against the total volume of people that believe it isn't E2EE -- it'll be an easy 2x for you or me.
• codethief 9mo ago
  Matthew Green's take from 3 days ago: > There’s a lawsuit against WhatsApp making the rounds today, claiming that Meta has access to plaintext. I see nothing in there that’s compelling; the whole thing sounds like a fishing expedition. https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3mdglo2z6i22i https://bsky.app/profile/matthewdgreen.bsky.social/post/3mdg...
• mlmonkey 9mo ago
  I'm shocked, shocked! that there's gambling going on here ...