this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
732 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
59197 readers
2518 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Meta could easily have the WhatsApp client upload decryption keys to their servers without any notification to the user.
Not sure what you mean, of course WhatsApp can disable it's own encryption. That would be an argument for open source third party apps and interoperability.
What I'm talking about has nothing to do with the line protocol. Each client has encryption key pairs. The public key of the first party shares it with the other parties, and vice versa. If it's encrypted with the public key then the private key can decrypt it.
If Meta gets the private keys, they can decrypt any message they want independent of whatever protocol is being used.
But aren't these key pairs generated per session and/or per contact? So once you switch to a more secure / auditable client this only matters when communicating with people on whatsapp. But they presumably have a backdoor in their app for the NSA anyway.
No body said it's going to have the same level of security, but that still doesn't mean that should just give up on it, just put a small icon indicating this is a WhatsApp user.