WhatsApp To Offer End-to-End Encryption

Posted by timothy on Thursday November 20, 2014 @02:20AM from the trend-worth-extending dept.

L-One-L-One (173461) writes In a surprise move, nine months after being bought by Facebook, WhatsApp has begun rolling out end-to-end encryption for its users. With true end-to-end encryption data becomes unaccessible to admins of WhatsApp or law enforcement authorities. This new feature first proposed on Android only has been developed in cooperation with Open Whisper Systems, based on TextSecure. With hundreds of million users, WhatsApp becomes by far the largest secure messaging application. FBI Director James Comey might not be pleased. Do you have a current favorite for encrypted online chat?

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Re:FBI Director James Comey may not care. by Pi1grim · 2014-11-20 02:44 · Score: 5, Interesting

The problem with WhatsApp is that it is closed-source, so you can't really check. You'll have to take their word for it. Also, they facilitate key exchange, so the whole "end-to-end" stuff is actually moot, since user is taken out of the loop and server can, at any time re-negotiate the keys and verify that MITM as a person A, that person B is trying to get in contact with. So it's all, once again, a lot of buzzwords, and zero security.