Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption - Slashdot
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Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from PCMag: A lawsuit claims that WhatsApp's end-to-end encryption is a sham, and is demanding damages, but the app's parent company, Meta, calls the claims "false and absurd." The lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco US district court on Friday and c...

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.

  • just_another_person@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    11 hours ago

    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.

    • pressanykeynow@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 hours ago

      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?

      server would catch and reject it if it’s fingerprints don’t match the previously known good copy, or a public version

      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.

      Now you’re just coming up with weird things to justify the paranoia

      I’m just asking questions about security I don’t know answers to, I’m not stating that’s how things are.