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.
What if the malicious actor is not Signal but Google or the hardware manufacturer?
Can we check that the encryption key generated by the device is not stored somewhere on the device? Same for the OS.
Can we check that the app running in memory is the same that is available for reproducible build checks?
Can we check that your and my apps at the moment are the same as the one security researchers tested?
The clients (apps) enforce key symmetry for your own keys, server identity, and the exchanged with the other person part of a conversation. Constantly. There is no way to MITM that.
The clients are open source, and audited regularly, and yes, builds are binary reproduceable and fingerprinted on release.
That’s not to say someone can’t build a malicious copy that does dumb stuff and put it in your phone to replace the other copy, but the server would catch and reject it if it’s fingerprints don’t match the previously known good copy, or a public version.
Now you’re just coming up with weird things to justify the paranoia. None of this has anything to do with Signal itself, which is as secure as it gets.
Didn’t I say that at the start of my questions? What’s your point?
If I understand you correctly, you mean that Signal app checks itself and sends the result to the server that can then deny access to it? Is that what Signal does and what makes it difficult to spoof this fingerprint?
I don’t think you answered any of my questions though since they weren’t about Signal.
I’m just asking questions about security I don’t know answers to, I’m not stating that’s how things are.
I did answer your questions, but if I missed something, feel free to ask and I can clarify.