As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed “courageous whistleblowers” who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user’s messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app’s end-to-end encryption. “A worker need only send a ‘task’ (i.e., request via Meta’s internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job,” the lawsuit claims. “The Meta engineering team will then grant access – often without any scrutiny at all – and the worker’s workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user’s messages based on the user’s User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products.”
“Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users’ messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required,” the 51-page complaint adds. “The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated – essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted.” The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.
DUH
No if this is proven it would be a real scandal and would bring a lot of users to better alternatives.
If it’s false that’s good too, since then WA has e2e encryption
would bring a lot of users to better alternatives.
Most users of whatsapp don’t care about e2e. They hardly even know what it is.
Right. This place sometimes forget that we are tiny community of techies that hate the system. Makes me see this place as a bit of a circlejerk at times.
Yeah the venn diagram overlap of “people who understand and care about e2ee enough to drop a messaging app for not supporting it” and “people who use whatsapp” has to be a sliver
It must really be empty… Two contradictory assumptions lol
Not empty… It’s hard to embark all your family, relatives and friends on your journey to fucking basic privacy principles
deleted by creator
No but average people understand the concept of meta reading and accessing your private message. That would be a scandal and righly so
They don’t but they do know what “Any Meta employee, and every US government employees, can read all of your messages” means
Especially if they saw it now
They don’t know what e2e encryption is, but they sure as hell know what “employees have access to all your messages” means. Sure, it makes it harder for them to find a good alternative, but it will scare some away from Meta (unknown how many will actually care).
True. But some would care about broken promises
It’s already a known risk, because WA uses centralized key management and servers, and always has regardless what Meta says. If you believe their bullshit, then I feel sad for you.
Also…you don’t think that LAWYERS willing to go up against Meta would have rock solid proof from these whistleblowers FIRST before filing a lawsuit?
C’mon now, buddy.
Also…you don’t think that LAWYERS willing to go up against Meta would have rock solid proof from these whistleblowers FIRST before filing a lawsuit?
This is not how civil court works. It’s not trial by combat. There is no standard for the quality of lawsuits filed. And despite what the ambulance chasers say on TV, Layers get paid even when they loose.
“alleged in a lawsuit…” is the same level of credibility as “they out here saying…”.
It doesn’t matter if it’s criminal or civil. The costs to bring such a case are massive, and you’re leaving yourself open to a behemoth like Meta just dragging out the case for lengthy periods of time which drastically increase those costs.
No law firm files suit against a giant company like this unless they have rock solid proof they will, at the very least, land a settlement plus recuperation of costs. Just not a thing.
What do you want from me here?
Mark zuckerberg eats scandals for breakfast
Yes but Whatsapp has been pretty reliable and trustworthy for many people. No ads etc
People wouldnt move. They know its not secure and they dont care enough.
If it’s false
How would we know?
What are the better alternatives? because it seems like the comment section is flooded with people (yourself included) that don’t understand that most (probably all) e2e messaging apps are vulnerable to this attack as long as they trust a centralized server.
The issue isn’t an encryption one, it’s a trust one that requires you to trust the makers of the messaging app and the servers the apps connect to (and the method by which the app is distributed to you).
Signal uses reproducible builds for its Android client, and I think for desktop as well. That means it’s possible to verify that a particular Signal package is built from the open source Signal codebase. I don’t have to trust Signal because I can check or build it myself.
If I don’t have extreme security needs, I don’t even have to check. Signal has a high enough profile that I can be confident other people have checked, likely many other people who are more skilled at auditing cryptographic code than I am.
Trusting the server isn’t necessary because the encryption is applied by the sender’s client and removed by the recipient’s client.
likely many other people who are more skilled at auditing cryptographic code than I am
Maybe but that doesn’t mean you have the same app they do, Google may have different apks for people who could check it and for those who won’t.
There is a risk Google could tamper with the app for specific users if they’re installing it from Google Play. I think it’s likely security researchers would discover that if it was widespread, but there’s a chance Google could do it undetected if they targeted it selectively enough.
People who are concerned about this can download the APK directly from Signal and check its signature before installation.
Signal
You’re just replacing trust in Meta with trust in Signal Inc without understanding why WhatsApp is vulnerable to this.
Is Signal Inc more trustworthy than Meta? probably
is Signal (app) safe from the attack described? absolutely not.
Tell me you don’t understand how Signal’s E2E mechanism works without telling me you don’t understand how Signal’s E2E mechanism works.
Tell me you don’t understand what E2E encryption is without telling me you don’t understand that the limits of E2E encryption.
See every other comment in this thread describing in great detail why you are wrong, but that you fundamentally DO NOT UNDERSTAND how any of this works whatsoever.
You fundamentally DO NOT UNDERSTAND how security works, go play with your algorithms and stop spamming my replies.
Um, security is based largely on encryption algorithms.
This is key and I don’t think Signal shies away from this. You MUST trust the code you’re running. We know there are unofficial Signal builds. You must trust them. Why? Because think of it this way. You’re running a build of Signal, you type a messages. In code that text you type then gets run through Signal’s encryption. If you’re running a non-trustworthy build, they have access to the clear text before encryption, obviously. They can encrypt it twice, once with their key and once with yours, send it to a server, decrypt theirs and send yours on to it’s destination. (for example, there’s more ways than this).
The code can be okay but it’s delivery method(aka Google), the OS(aka Google) or the hardware can be compromised.
Just because it’s centralized doesn’t mean that it falls under this risk sector. Theoretically if the app was open sourced and was confirmed to not share your private key remotely on generation (or cross sign the key to allow a master key…), then the most the centralized server could know is your public key, the server wouldn’t have the ability to obtain the private key (which is what is needed to read the e2e encrypted messages)
This process would be repeated for the other party. The cool part of that system is you can still share your public keys via the centralized server, so you wouldn’t need to share the key externally. You just need to be able to confirm that the app itself doesn’t contain code to send your private key to the centralized server. Then checking integrity is as easy as messaging your friend to post what their public key is, and that public key would need to match the public key that the server is supplying as your contact.
The server can’t MiTM attack it because the server has no way of deciphering the message in the first place, so the most it could do is pass the message onto the proper party whom has the private key to be able to decrypt it.
Not that I have any other suggestions aside from signal though, there aren’t many centralized e2e chat services. Most use client to server encryption which would allow decryption server side.
Just because it’s centralized doesn’t mean that it falls under this risk sector.
The attack as described almost certainly involves the server sending a message to your client and then having the messages replicated via a side channel to Whatsapp without breaking E2E encryption (it could be adding them as a desktop client or adding them as a hidden participant in all chats, that isn’t clear in the article)
If you could run Whatsapp without connecting to Meta, you would be safe from this attack, but as you’ve pointed out a secure client is a better solution.
Fully agree that in this case if the claim is true (they have had a few of these claims), it’s likely whatsapp either making itself a companion app that’s hidden, or has some form of escrow in place to allow deciphering the messages. (Considering Messenger allows decrypting e2e chats with a 6 digit security pin, I’m leaning towards an escrow)
I was just mentioning that this isn’t a fault of it being centralized, this is a design choice by the company when implementing e2e encryption, and that a properly functioning system would never give the server the ability to decipher the messages in the first place.
With e2e you don’t need to trust the servers. You only need to trust the client that does the encryption.
Should you not also trust your device hardware, it’s os and the market you got the app from?
That’s a given I think. If you can’t trust the OS then you can’t trust the client.
The attack as described almost certainly involves the server sending a message to your client and then having the messages replicated via a side channel to Whatsapp without breaking E2E encryption.
But yes the point is you can’t trust the clients.
If you could run Whatsapp without connecting to Meta, you would be safe from this attack, but as you’ve pointed out a secure client is a better solution.
deleted by creator
What is your alternative? Everybody codes their own app??
Also you’re unhinged in these comments
People should understand the limits of E2E encryption.
I’d rather be unhinged than wrong.
It would not. People don’t care. People don’t care that meta is an evil corp. Encryption is not even close to the top 10 reasons people use that app. It’s just a random word normal users throw around because marketing told them it’s good.
Normal users don’t talk about encryption at all but they somewhat trust WhatsApp
Shocked, I tell you
That’s just another comment
Well if I can’t trust Meta with my information, who CAN I trust
The drunk dude that’s always sitting on the ground near the park entrance and sell weird tissue dolls with curly hairs is more trustworthy, I’d say.
Assume the same for Telegram and pretty much any chat platform that controls your private keys.
Telegram doesnt even pretend to be end to end encrypted.
Telegram for iOS lets you create “secret chats” but as far as I know other platforms have eliminated that functionality at the request of governments. And I would assume Apple technically controls the keys on device.
iOS lets you create “secret chats”
How? Not natively unless I’m mistaken
Not natively that I know of, but Telegram for iOS has the option when looking at someone’s profile. However, the Windows client does not.
Ah I see your edit now, thanks (and see how it was assumed implied :) )
The telegram was clear as a day they announced cooperation with the Russian government and they unblocked it. That was way before the whole France fiasco, I doubt they’re actually giving up the keys to France. I’m from East and many say that Telegram now is essentially a Russian weapon. Surveillance at home, total free reign (sell drugs, spread CP, etc.) in west.
If you’re American, I believe Telegram is actually safer than Whatsapp, as long as you can ignore the dirty side of it (surface deep web?), hence why Europe wants it under control
It is end to end encrypted but they can just pull the decrypted message from the app. This has been assumed for years, since they said they could parse messages for advertising purposes.
Hasn’t it always been that they can decrypt the backups that you personally setup in wa, this way they don’t legally lie to you when the app tells you “this chat is encrypted, even Whatsapp cannot read the messages”.
Yes, any time you can store and recover encrypted cloud archives across devices, without needing to transfer keys between devices, it implies that there is a key archive somewhere in the cloud. Even Signal struggles to get this both user friendly and properly secure without compromising forward secrecy. I believe they still actually make you explicitly do a local key transfer to populate a new device, even though they have cloud archives now. Whatsapp doesn’t do that. And the app also clearly leaks some amount of unencrypted data anyway, archives or not.
Surely they have access otherwise how do they moderate and investigate account blocks, reports of spam etc. Accounts get suspended, then some automation reviews it, then it escalates to a human, who will have to make a judgement based on some policy. How can they do that if they see nothing? (I’m asking not condoning).
15 years ago I’d have called this a conspiracy theory given how the evidence seems to be anecdotal, but given literally every single other thing we’ve learned in recent times about how cartoonishly evil and lying the tech bros truly are, it seems entirely likely.
s/the tech bros/humans/
Despite “the tech bros” really being that, I’m learning over time about some people surprisingly cowardly and evil, while looking like better versions of me, and some other people looking pretty normal and usual, while being epic and tragic heroes, and some other people looking like a typical Nazi 80 years late to the party, yet more honorable than many, and some other people looking like weak and nice versions of me, while having real warrior spirit.
You have no idea how big the world is in all dimensions. We are all looking at it via our daily interactions, via news and internet discussions, via games and via books, and we don’t see what’s deep inside. Well, I suppose, people who read classics can see something.
And they, these people on top of big tech, being just human, have such powers. What can they do with them? Perhaps we should forgive them for not being wise in deciding to have those powers, and praise them for doing less evil with them than they could.
So. Perhaps in 15 years you’ve just grown.
WhatsApp client is closed source. Any claims around E2EE is pointless, since it’s impossible to verify.
It’s E2EE alright. Just, don’t ask what “ends” we’re talking about.
For Facebook it doesn’t matter if its e2e. They control the client on both sides. They can just let the client sent the clear text data to them.
TMBE
Trust me bro encryption
Any claims around E2EE is pointless, since it’s impossible to verify.
This is objectively false. Reverse engineering is a thing, as is packet inspection.
Reverse engineering is theoretically possible, but often very difficult in practice.
I’m not enough of an expert in cryptography to know for sure if packet inspection would allow you to tell if a ciphertext could be decrypted by a second “back door” key. My gut says it’s not possible, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Now you just need Meta to allow you on their networks to inspect packets and reverse engineer their servers because as far as I know, WhatsApp messages are not P2P.
/edit I betcha $5 that the connection from client to server is TLS(https), good luck decrypting that to see what its payload is.
No it is not. Whatsapp gets several updates a month. How do you keep up with that rate?
Outside of open-source. That shit is usually illegal
It isn’t. Otherwise security research would never happen for proprietary software and services.
SureSure no white hat never been sued before
In the US, CFAA is so draconian that in certain aspects it can be very illegal to reverse engineer code behind explicit ToS which whatsapp make you agree through click-wrap agreement (meaning explicit I agree button press) upon installing the app. So Meta could easily sue you with very good chance of winning. I work in security and reverse engineer a lot of stuff but just because my company has lawyers that will protect me (also I’m not an american) but generally americans are super fucked here and there are many stories of people being sued and even imprisoned for breaking ToS.
If I am not adding my own private key to the app, like in Tox, I don’t trust their encryption.
What’s to stop an evil company uploading the keys as soon as you enter them in the App? It certainly wouldn’t stop Meta.
Man, you just brought back memories. I forgot qtox was even a thing. I think I still have my profile saved in my dev folder somewhere for my account
E2EE isn’t really relevant, when the “ends” have the functionality, to share data with Meta directly: as “reports”, “customer support”, “assistance” (Meta AI); where a UI element is the separation.
Edit: it turns out cloud backups aren’t E2E encrypted by default… meaning: any backup data, which passes through Meta’s servers, to the cloud providers (like iCloud or Google Account), is unobscured to Meta; unless E2EE is explicitly enabled. And even then, WhatsApp’s privacy policy states: “if you use a data backup service integrated with our Services (like iCloud or Google Account), they will receive information you share with them, such as your WhatsApp messages.” So the encryption happens on the server side, meaning: Apple and Google still have full access to the content. It doesn’t matter if you, personally, refuse to use the “feature”: if the other end does, your interactions will be included in their backups.
Yeah. E2EE isn’t a single open standard. It’s a general security concept / practice. There’s no way to argue that they don’t really have E2EE if in fact they do, but they keep a copy of the encryption key for themselves. Also, the workers client app can simply have the “decrypt step” done transparently. Or, a decrypted copy of the messages could be stored in a cache that the client app uses… who knows? E2EE being present or not isn’t really the main story here. It’s Meta’s obvious deceitful-ness by leveraging the implicit beliefs about E2EE held by us common folk.
I don’t think it can be called End to End Encryption if it is actually End to End and The guy in the Middle.
Every technical definition of End to End Encryption states only the Sender and Recipient have keys to decrypt the message.
Anything else is using “End to End Encryption” purely as a marketing term like “Lite” or “Pure”.
It’s not End to End and The guy in the Middle. The message is encrypted from one end to the other. The detail about who has a copy of the key doesn’t spoil that fact, and I guarantee you Meta doesn’t care about using E2EE as a marketing term even if it misrepresents their actual product by matter of status quo. What matters is what they can theoretically argue in a court room.
A proper solution would be to have an open standard that specially calls out these details, along with certifications issued by trusted third parties.
Yeah, I guess if you want users to keep sharing “confessions, [] difficult debates, or silly inside jokes” through a platform you’ve acquired, E2EE might give the WhatsApp user the false sense of privacy required.
Call me old fashioned but I really think that for real E2EE the vendor of the encryption and the vendor of the infrastructure should be two different entities.
For example PGP/GPG on <any mail provider>… great! Proton? Not great
Jabber/XMMP with e2ee encryption great! WhatsApp/Telegram/signal… less so (sure I take signal over the other two every day… but it’s enough to compromise a single entity for accessing the data)
Okay Old Fashioned, but doesn’t open source encryption audited by a third party solve this problem? Signal protocol for example? Also proton, I’m guessing, but I’m too lazy to check
Cynical me would say they don’t have to use the code they put up on GitHub in production.
By this logic, can we trust any open source software, even if they claim to use some third party encryption? They could say they’re using a super secure encryption, even show it implemented in their open source code base, then just put the other, secret evil backdoor code base in production? Is there a way for any open source project to prove that the code in their open source repo is the code in production?
This is called reproducible builds. With this all builds of a version will be binary-identical. So you can build from the repo and the compare it with the appstore binary and see if the owner was honest.
I found this:
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
Looks like they’re working on reproducibility, at least in the desktop app. That’s a little disappointing but i guess I’m happy they’re working on it.
Neat! And can this been done with signal or proton?
Signal: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
Proton: didn’t find anything (but I just did a quick lookup)
If you can self host it, yes. Like matrix
But only if you self-host right? Otherwise who ever hosts the matrix instance can tinker with it.
Correct.
In the end i have to choose between some shady company or some guy with a homelab. I guess I’ll choose the one who isn’t financially incentivized to screw me over.
Yep
Unfortunately even the best intentioned and best audited project can be compromised. So that is not a guarantee (sure, much better than closed source but that is a given)
You may be forced by a rubber hose attack (or legal one) to insert vulnerabilities in your code… and you have the traffic… a single point to attack… signal/proton/etc
Is it possible with two different vendors? Sure it is but it is way more complicated
That’s a really good point. All we’d need is for signal devs to be compromised in some way and the next update ends security for signal.
why
Not much people use clients anymore.
Yeah and I think it’s a pity. It’s the byproduct of “app culture” everything has to be easy. One button, plug and play…
Unfortunately like many things in life “saving” (time and effort n this case) has a cost
No surprised at all tbf.
A lot of victim blaming in this thread. Why can’t you just be mad for someone who was deceived?
Because it’s the gazillionth time the exactly totally absolutely same kind of shit happens with the very exactly same company that didn’t even try to hide who they were.
And next week the very very same deceived people will be of Facebook, Instagram, etc. And maybe, just MAYBE they’ll migrate away from Whatsapp… to join another proprietary network of another billonaire’s controlled megacorp.Because I’m tired of being “that pain in the ass” when barely suggesting to use something else all to see at the end people crying over things they’ve be warned about.
If a kid burns themself once on a kitchen’s hotplate, you assume they learnt their lesson in an unfortunate way despite all the warnings.
If adults keep burning themselves over and over… and over and over and over, at which point are you entitled to say they’re part of the f*cking problem??I’m sick of Mark fucking zuckerberg.
If i was the mad king of the usa all of those tech bros would be in a jail in el salvador.
OH JUST USE SOMETHING ELSE!
I do but that doesn’t stop that ugly weak fuck from stealing from my business every chance he fucking gets.
It’s like buying a hot dog from a gas station and not feeling awesome tomorrow.
If you keep buying the hot dog every week, you see other people buying it and are fine, but you’re the only one getting sick week after week, at some point maybe you should just stop buying the hot dog.
No one else is getting sick. They know what they’re getting. But you keep buying it expecting this time it’ll be different. And when it isn’t it’s the gas stations fault.
at what point is it someone’s responsibility to simply know better?
this isn’t some complicated deceit it’s literally one of the most untrustworthy companies in the world lying to your face. A company we’ve known for now like two decades is untrustworthy and overtly harms people to make money
do people have responsibility at all?
If companies are lying in their advertising to the general public, then that is something the companies are responsible for. You can blame the victims, but that’s kind of stupid because there are so many people in the world who are not technically savvy. They don’t have the resources, background, knowledge, and skills to evaluate whether what the company is telling them is true. That’s why there are laws designed to protect consumers from lying companies.
Would it be great if everyone was an expert in everything? Yes. Are they? No. They never will be. That’s why we have laws.
Do you think an attractive woman who has been raped multiple times should simply know better? Is she asking for it if she wears slightly more revealing clothing? How many times does she need to be sexually abused before it’s her fault? How much responsibility does she have for her own abuse?
Somehow you’ve managed to connect basic consumer responsibility to being raped
There is literally something wrong with your brain if these are somehow remotely appropriate to compare
You gatta be real stupid to not realize that Facebook is harvesting your data.
Proposed line of defense: “With all respect, M. Judge, with all the different times we fucked our users, lied to them, tricked them, experimented on them, ignored them, we already sold private discussions on Facebook in the past, our CEO and founder most famous quote is «They trust me, dumbfucks!», the list goes on and on: no one in their sane mind would genuinely believe we were not spying on Whatsapp! They try to play dumb, they could not possibly believe we were being fair and honest THIS time?!”
insert pikachushockedface
What?!! No. The owner of WhatsApp would never lie to us.
