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Security Experts Rebut The Guardian's Report That Claimed WhatsApp Has a Backdoor (gizmodo.com)
William Turton, writing for Gizmodo: This morning, the Guardian published a story with an alarming headline: "WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages." If true, this would have massive implications for the security and privacy of WhatsApp's one-billion-plus users. Fortunately, there's no backdoor in WhatsApp, and according to Alec Muffett, an experienced security researcher who spoke to Gizmodo, the Guardian's story is a "major league fuckwittage." [...] Fredric Jacobs, who was the iOS developer at Open Whisper Systems, the collective that designed and maintains the Signal encryption protocol, and who most recently worked at Apple, said, "Nothing new. Of course, if you don't verify keys Signal/WhatsApp/... can man-in-the-middle your communications." "I characterize the threat posed by such reportage as being fear and uncertainty and doubt on an 'anti-vaccination' scale," Muffett, who previously worked on Facebook's engineering security infrastructure team, told Gizmodo. "It is not a bug, it is working as designed and someone is saying it's a 'flaw' and pretending it is earth shattering when in fact it is ignorable." The supposed "backdoor" the Guardian is describing is actually a feature working as intended, and it would require significant collaboration with Facebook to be able to snoop on and intercept someone's encrypted messages, something the company is extremely unlikely to do. "There's a feature in WhatsApp that -- when you swap phones, get a new phone, factory reset, whatever -- when you install WhatsApp freshly on the new phone and continue a conversation, the encryption keys get re-negotiated to accommodate the new phone," Muffett told Gizmodo. Other security experts and journalists have also criticized The Guardian's story.
Retransmission with unverified key is a programming error.
It would be nice if The Guardian produced a list for the average person of the most popular software that has known backdoors like Skype, so people can see how compromised they are under pretext of "tackling terrorism".
Take Nobody's Word For It.
its name is "Facebook."
meh
Did no one think to ask?
Well, apparently the President Elect of the USA believes the anti-vaccination idea, so...soon it will move on from "fear and doubt" into "official policy".
Well, first off, I'm going to be a little suspicious of experts who find fuckwittage in their dictionary, when a stupid cacahead reference will do. I dunno that taking a temper tantrum reassures me all that much.
My guideline is that if it is allowed, it is visible to someone who wants to see it badly enough.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
All those "ignorable" things are the reason why security eventually fails.
The supposed "backdoor" the Guardian is describing is actually a feature working as intended, and it would require significant collaboration with Facebook to be able to snoop on and intercept someone's encrypted messages, something the company is extremely unlikely to do
That sounds like a back door to me. Who trusts facebook anyway?
The Guardian has created a big name for itself for the massive scoops it has delivered.
Sometimes this leads to the unrealistic expectation that the scoops can keep being manufactured at a steady rate. Trying too hard much?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
It seems to be following the Independent's lead and becoming a clickbait factory.
Muffet is saying it's "major league fuckwittage", while acknowledging that the main point is true: Facebook could in fact intercept messages.
Jacobs says "well duh, if you send a message without verifying keys" - and Whatsapp does just that, automatically resends the message before you have a chance to verify the key.
First, this is really old news picked up by the Guardian: https://tobi.rocks/2016/04/wha... That's almost a year old! Second, this is not the biggest security issue IMHO: default WhatsApp behaviour is to backup all your messages unencrypted to Google Drive, therefore, if a government wants to read your messages, they'll just ask Google! (the content is inaccessible by you, but not to them! https://developers.google.com/... )
it would require significant collaboration with Facebook to be able to snoop on and intercept someone's encrypted messages, something the company is extremely unlikely to do.
Why does /. allow ridiculous PR articles?
"The supposed "backdoor" the Guardian is describing is actually a feature working as intended, and it would require significant collaboration with Facebook to be able to snoop on and intercept someone's encrypted messages, something the company is extremely unlikely to do."
A backdoor that requires Facebook's help to snoop is still a backdoor, is it not?
If it's no big deal, where's the option to disable this autorenegotiation of keys, assuming that I'm not fussed about whether my messages migrate when I update my handset, but am fussed about Facebook having the technical means to give a copy of my supposedly secure messages to any random phone that their system authenticates?
The Whatsapp client is proprietary and closed source.
It should be assumed to be compromised regardless of what anyone says about it.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
He is missing the point.
The article is not speaking about an encryption flaw or anything like that, but about a backdoor - a feature that allows Facebook, without any code changes on your device or other intrusion - to eavesdrop on any conversation you are having.
A good encryption would be impenetrable even to the vendor. It should not allow the keys to be changed underneath you. It should not warn you afterwards about this fact, and only if you have a special option enabled, but it should tell you before it does a key change, and require your consent.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
There is a problem in my opinion and denial won't get it fixed. Sure you need to renegotiate keys with a new device but it should not happen automagically without your knowledge. You should have to do it manually and it should not be done for you based on an assumption and all your messages be resent with the new keys.
Whatsapp's defaults do not prevent MiTM and do not even warn you something's afoot.
That's doubleplus bad.
I think we can leave it at that without the drama.
" and it would require significant collaboration with Facebook to be able to snoop on and intercept someone's encrypted messages, something the company is extremely unlikely to do"
Let me fix that for you:
and it would require significant collaboration with Facebook to be able to snoop on and intercept someone's encrypted messages, something the company is guaranteed to do for their NSA partners.
how do we know that Facebook does not collaborate with the intelligence agencies, under an NDA? It's an American company after all, and they have to do what their government tells them to, including lying and denying.
Some disclaimer:
I have moderate IT Security experience. I'm admittedly not the ITSec convention-going type, but I've developed for solid security, done successful penetration testing on people's code and the likes... From the guardian's article, and from my POV, the major issue here is one of wording: a Backdoor is a feature, one intentionally added by developers and hidden from the end user-facing stuff such as UI and (R)TFM. This is definitely not a backdoor - it looks like a flaw, probably associated with different use cases of whatsapp vs the original API, considering it happens on verbose conditions, and it surely seems tricky to replicate without very explicit user behavior. Apparently even a change in defaults by whatsapp can solve this.
Now for the real issue:
How can anyone even start arguing about an article's guilt on this or Whatsapp intentions without tackling the subject that: every closed source app claiming privacy (such as whatsapp), however you paint it, can never do so as guaranteed without being open source. There is one way, and one way only, that privacy can be achieved without having to trust on privacy policies, disclosures, public legal action or even secretive court orders and it is to open source the damn thing and providing a way of building that outputs the same without the branding (think Chromium or the Mozilla suite in Debian).
Here's the deal: Whatsapp states it uses the Whisper API but they might as well not use it. Whisper and Signal might state they collaborate and trusts they do use it, but who is to say they aren't being paid for this, lying or even chain-trusting blindly in Whatsapp statements of use? Oh wait, so there's a legal binding document saying Whatsapp actually does this... BIG DEAL. There are also constitutions being RAPED EVERY DAY by US, Chinese, Russian, (every country?) security services.
Snowden advises on using Signal for two essential reasons that cannot be taken apart:
1. he has access to the shyt going on inside and...
2. he actually understands that shyt.
Number one is the big deal here, and number 2 is the reason he publicly admits his support for Signal - people trust his technical judgement. Granted, no.1 won't make much sense to 99% of the world at which point you have to start trusting on someone's technical ability, reputation and honor, and for fuck sake Whatsapp is a commercial application based in the US - they HAVE to lie about such things, they don't even get a choice. Just having no.1 is like placing your neck under the sword of the entire world community. It's a lot better than a feature list, and advert, a legal document, someone's word. it's everybody's word.
This is no conspiration theory, but logic beats trust, and most here, as engineers should be very aware of that. Even the trust in one's own actions isn't fallible - some people lie to themselves, some people don't know better than to believe they have failed at something and will trust blindly on their own ability. But sooner or later everybody finds out we are only as perfects as what we are made of. SHOW ME WHAT YOUR APP IS MADE OF and you will have the right for my complete blind trust (because it just isn't blind anymore). It can even be coded in esperanto (intentional bullshit here). It's the only way it is honestly submitted for scrutiny of your own statements of privacy and security.
So how is that any different from open source software?
If you're downloading a precompiled binary, regardless of platform and regardless of distribution method, it could have been compromised knowingly or unknowingly (if the compiler is compromised, for example) by whoever is generating and providing the binary. The code that was compiled may not be the same as the open source code. Or perhaps the code is the same, but a compromised compiler emits a compromised binary.
You're not necessarily safe even if you compile it yourself. Even if the source code is available to you, have you actually performed a thorough security audit of the code in question, along with every single line of code it directly or indirectly depends on (this would include all libraries, and even the OS kernel)? Probably not.
Then there's the whole issue of your compiler/interpreter/VM potentially being compromised without your knowledge. It doesn't matter how thorough your code review is if your compiler/interpreter/VM can insert malicious code without your knowledge.
Open source software might actually be worse, in that it can give a false sense of security. The OpenSSL library is a great example of how things can go wrong. People thought that there were "millions of eyeballs" checking it for flaws, yet it turns out that almost nobody was. Many serious flaws were introduced, they went unnoticed by good actors, and then they were ripe for exploitation by bad characters.
Should we trust proprietary, closed source software? Probably not. But we shouldn't think that open source software is necessarily any better. It isn't, and as we've seen, it may actually be more misleading than closed source software is.
And this was a program championed by a supposedly smart security researcher - Moxie.
Good thing I don't trust people who say "You should trust this encryption!" because they've all been proven wrong historically.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Alec has completely misunderstood this and criticised another researcher unjustifiably. The point of the article was that whatsapp could renegotiate keys and most users would never know; and secondly, that for those who turn the feature on, they will be notified AFTER the message is sent not beforehand.
The supposed "backdoor" the Guardian is describing is actually a feature working as intended, and it would require significant collaboration with Facebook to be able to snoop on and intercept someone's encrypted messages, something the company is extremely unlikely to do
Ah yes, the old, "security through trusting giant megacorp not to mine your data." With a proper 256-bit encryption, and a botnet of a billion machines capable of each trying 1 billion keys per second the probability of cracking my message this year would be about 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000003. Is Jacobs suggesting the probability of Facebook or a foreign government using this flaw to intercept encrypted messages is smaller than that?
"...and it would require significant collaboration with Facebook to be able to snoop on and intercept someone's encrypted messages, something the company is extremely unlikely to do."
Exactly. No data mining company would ever do that and you should, of course, trust them.
Same old silicon valley crack smoking pipe dreams...
If you don't trust WhatsApp to faithfully regenerate encryption keys, why the hell did you trust them to generate the initial keys in the first place? They could have just given Facebook a key then and let them listen in to your messages at any time. ANY messaging app, no matter how secure, can do this.
This is not a backdoor, it's an inherent vulnerability in all encryption systems. If you don't trust one end of the encryption, it doesn't matter if the keys are only generated once or if they're generated over and over, or if you're notified when they're regenerated or if they just regenerate them on the fly. At any point, an untrustworthy server can simply make a valid key for a third party, and your encryption is compromised.
This is a non-story. You know what 99% of people do in Signal when they get a notification that their encryption key has changed? They hit OK and re-send the message, just like WhatsApp does by default.
It's just like EULA's, nobody pays attention to those damn thigns. WhatsApp just skips the step of asking you to verify the encryption change unless you go into the settings and explicitly tell it to notify you. For most people, that's exactly the appropriate behavior.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
it's owned by Facebook.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Just like every single other corporate service in the world.
If you sell a product you have to follow the law and the law says that law enforcement can read and listen to whatever they want.
It is really simple. Every corporate product is subject to legal intercept and anyone saying otherwise is a liar.
>> It is not a bug, it is working as designed ...
Backdoor is working as intended. Nothing to see here. Move on. Yeah right.
He is talking about a legitimate feature in the protocol that has a reason to be here but is turned into a genuine backdoor by the Watsapp application because watsapp does not let the user confirm new keys.
aaaaaaa
And now we can add more names to the list of "paid off by the NSA".
It is downgrading the security. Normally, an attacker would need to steal your key or the receiving end (you and the other person in turns) will get "wrong key, somebody is doing something BAD" warnings.
Whatsapp doesn't do this. Whatsapp displays a message "the remote end has changed its security number[sic!]". But only if you activated it in the settings. Else you get NO HINT AT ALL.
The next point are unsent messages. The report seems to exaggerate there a bit. The problem here: Go offline, type some messages. Go online, they are sent. Before you have the chance to see the "security number changed" message, which may have you prevented from sending the messages.
The problem is there but doesn't happen often, because its likely you see the message soon (if you do not ignore such messages).
I did not test it, but it may be, that you get the message only after the next message you sent, even when you're online. Which is another trap, if you really need security for every message.
When I started to get Signal, it said that it wants access to everything? Didn't sound like it was for privacy.
now we can be sure it has a backdoor
thanks gizmodo!
"I don't shoot my mouth off without knowing what I'm talking about" - by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Thursday December 31, 2015 @09:29AM (#51215379)
I catch you shooting your mouth off fucking up constantly: 2 raymorris security fuckups https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5351503&cid=47379233/ & https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5351503&cid=47374033/ + raymorris = script kiddie https://politics.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8895203&cid=51726265/
&
Tell us how ONLY 'newer script kiddie tools' have stringlength built in (when PASCAL had it for ages - my fav tool) https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8472509&cid=51114383/ YOU BLUNDERING WANNABE!
APK
P.S.=> You like to talk behind others' backs like the gossiping bitch TROLL you are raymorris https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=9880997&cid=53312265/ well, here I am letting YOU TALK in those links, showing your FAILS wannabe ... apk
Schneier mentions this vulnerability as a real threat on his blog. https://www.schneier.com/blog/... Did he actually endorse anything that says it isn't? (The link on the main page of slashdot.org claims he did.)