- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- privacy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- privacy@programming.dev
- privacy@lemmy.ml
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.
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insert pikachushockedface
Well if I can’t trust Meta with my information, who CAN I trust
Me
Call me old fashioned but I really think that for real E2EE the vendor of the encryption and the vendor of the infrastructure should be two different entities.
For example PGP/GPG on <any mail provider>… great! Proton? Not great
Jabber/XMMP with e2ee encryption great! WhatsApp/Telegram/signal… less so (sure I take signal over the other two every day… but it’s enough to compromise a single entity for accessing the data)
Okay Old Fashioned, but doesn’t open source encryption audited by a third party solve this problem? Signal protocol for example? Also proton, I’m guessing, but I’m too lazy to check
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Yep
By this logic, can we trust any open source software, even if they claim to use some third party encryption? They could say they’re using a super secure encryption, even show it implemented in their open source code base, then just put the other, secret evil backdoor code base in production? Is there a way for any open source project to prove that the code in their open source repo is the code in production?
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This is called reproducible builds. With this all builds of a version will be binary-identical. So you can build from the repo and the compare it with the appstore binary and see if the owner was honest.
I found this:
https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Desktop/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
Looks like they’re working on reproducibility, at least in the desktop app. That’s a little disappointing but i guess I’m happy they’re working on it.
Neat! And can this been done with signal or proton?
Signal: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
Proton: didn’t find anything (but I just did a quick lookup)
WhatsApp client is closed source. Any claims around E2EE is pointless, since it’s impossible to verify.
It’s E2EE alright. Just, don’t ask what “ends” we’re talking about.
TMBE
Trust me bro encryption
Any claims around E2EE is pointless, since it’s impossible to verify.
This is objectively false. Reverse engineering is a thing, as is packet inspection.
Reverse engineering is theoretically possible, but often very difficult in practice.
I’m not enough of an expert in cryptography to know for sure if packet inspection would allow you to tell if a ciphertext could be decrypted by a second “back door” key. My gut says it’s not possible, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.
Hell, as far as I know, E2EE would be indistinguishable from client to server encryption, where the server can read everything without the need for a secret “backdoor key”. You can see that the channel is encrypted, but you can’t know who has the other key.
Outside of open-source. That shit is usually illegal
A lot of victim blaming in this thread. Why can’t you just be mad for someone who was deceived?
Because it’s the gazillionth time the exactly totally absolutely same kind of shit happens with the very exactly same company that didn’t even try to hide who they were.
And next week the very very same deceived people will be of Facebook, Instagram, etc. And maybe, just MAYBE they’ll migrate away from Whatsapp… to join another proprietary network of another billonaire’s controlled megacorp.Because I’m tired of being “that pain in the ass” when barely suggesting to use something else all to see at the end people crying over things they’ve be warned about.
If a kid burns themself once on a kitchen’s hotplate, you assume they learnt their lesson in an unfortunate way despite all the warnings.
If adults keep burning themselves over and over… and over and over and over, at which point are you entitled to say they’re part of the f*cking problem??at what point is it someone’s responsibility to simply know better?
this isn’t some complicated deceit it’s literally one of the most untrustworthy companies in the world lying to your face. A company we’ve known for now like two decades is untrustworthy and overtly harms people to make money
do people have responsibility at all?
People can’t take increase responsibility for every single aspect of life. It seems straightforward to you because you’re likely tech literate. Do you know every process around how the mechanic services your vehicle, how medicines are made that you consume, how food is curated that you consume, how energy is generated that you consume? People can’t have intimate knowledge of every aspect of life, therefore if a company says “this is E2EE” you should be able to believe that at face value and rely on consumer protection agencies to follow up if it’s inaccurate.
You don’t need to be tech literate to follow the news. Meta has been caught in lie after lie for YEARS and it has all been widely reported on. Meta needs to face actual repercussions for their crimes against humanity, but anybody still buying into their bullshit is being willfully ignorant.
No that’s not correct at all. If a company says something you do not in fact just get to believe it at face value and do 0 research, this applies in every field you mentioned. What planet are you from where you are supposed to just believe what companies say at face value???
People often get second options from different mechanics, doctors, contractors, and all sorts of specialists when told something because you need to do your own research to know about stuff.
You literally do in fact need to try and learn and make informed decisions about everything in life.
Chief, if you needed to make an informed decision about every decision in life, there’d be no time for life. That’s why other people specialize in jobs so that within reason, confidence can be placed to their decision. I’m not saying you blindly agree and follow everything, but people can’t be responsible for every decision. For example, who made the seatbelt in your car? What research did you personally do to verify the safety of your seatbelt. What maintenance have you done to it to ensure that it works as intended? Pretty important life saving bit of equipment.
Edit: my presumption is that you(or the vast majority of the population) haven’t done any research into your seatbelt because you trust in the car company and the safety rating requirements of your nation to ensure adequate protection.
What you’re positing here is a view of life that Margaret Thatcher loved. The idea is, “There is no society. There are no laws. There is no oversight. Everything, all responsibility, all of it is 1000% individual.”
Of course in reality that’s nonsense. We live in a world with laws that are sometimes enforced, where governments sometimes protect us, because we want them to, because that’s good for us all.
But even if you believe in Thatcher’s view, then you have the problem of corporations. You can’t seriously argue that we should be responsible for everything ourselves, as individuals, and also that corporations should exist, because they are anti-individual.
If companies are lying in their advertising to the general public, then that is something the companies are responsible for. You can blame the victims, but that’s kind of stupid because there are so many people in the world who are not technically savvy. They don’t have the resources, background, knowledge, and skills to evaluate whether what the company is telling them is true. That’s why there are laws designed to protect consumers from lying companies.
Would it be great if everyone was an expert in everything? Yes. Are they? No. They never will be. That’s why we have laws.
DUH
No if this is proven it would be a real scandal and would bring a lot of users to better alternatives.
If it’s false that’s good too, since then WA has e2e encryption
would bring a lot of users to better alternatives.
Most users of whatsapp don’t care about e2e. They hardly even know what it is.
Right. This place sometimes forget that we are tiny community of techies that hate the system. Makes me see this place as a bit of a circlejerk at times.
Wait, you are telling me that the company whos entire business is collecting personal information, including people who don’t sign up for their services, to leverage for advertising, is keeping their platforms unsecured they can continually grab more information rather than secure it?
I for one am shocked, absolutely shocked.
The biggest news is that Slashdot is still alive.
Assume the same for Telegram and pretty much any chat platform that controls your private keys.
15 years ago I’d have called this a conspiracy theory given how the evidence seems to be anecdotal, but given literally every single other thing we’ve learned in recent times about how cartoonishly evil and lying the tech bros truly are, it seems entirely likely.
Im not a big fan of meta and WhatsApp, but these claims are a bit much. Any employee gets access to messages through a well documented internal process? “No separate decryption step is required” , so the WhatsApp CLIENT is not doing any actual e2e encryption and no attempt at reverse engineering or traffic analysis has ever seen that this is the case?
Where can one see, what these whistleblowers have actually published? I would expect to see this “simple process” and how that interface actually works… And I would expect any journalist to request some proof (show me the last message i sent to Alice) before trusting an anonymous whistleblower making such an extraordinary claim.
From what I heard so far, that anonymous whistleblower could be a troll or an ex-employee who just wants to cause some trouble for meta.
We should not trust anything blindly, even if it fits with our view of the world. Meta is an evil company, but as long as there is no indication for these specific allegations to be true, we should treat them as unfounded allegations.
In principle the messages themselves could be E2E encrypted, but the closed-source WhatsApp client could transmit decryption keys to Meta HQ without anyone finding out. As long as the client or the client device is unsafe and not trusted, E2EE is not really effective. Which is why one should always demand a FOSS client for E2EE.
What?!! No. The owner of WhatsApp would never lie to us.
It would not be surprising if found to be true. Difficult to see how the current business model operates at a profit. Their long term goal is the usual loss leader model until a monopoly is achieved and then slug us with ads, sell all the data, hike the price, etc. Sickening to watch them cosy up to fascists. They are probably supplying any and all the agencies with intelligence scraped from their user base. If Facebook were a person they would be a psychopath.
If I am not adding my own private key to the app, like in Tox, I don’t trust their encryption.
What’s stopping the app from keeping your private key and still not encrypting anything?
I’m not trying to be difficult here, I just don’t see how anything outside of an application whose source you can check yourself can be trusted.
All applications hosted by other people require you to react positively to “just trust me bro”.
Or, if the app has the private key for decryption for the user to be able to see the messages, what’s stopping the app from copying that decrypted text somewhere else?
The thread model isn’t usually key management, it’s more about the insecure treatment of the decrypted message after decryption.
Tox also isn’t that great security wise. It’s hard to beat Signal when it comes to security messengers. And Signal is open source so, if it did anything weird with private keys, everyone would know
Well, Whatsapp uses signal. Bad timing
How?
And Signal is open source so, if it did anything weird with private keys, everyone would know
Well, no. At least not by default as you are running a compiled version of it. Someone could inject code you don’t know anything about before compilation that for example leaked your keys.
One way to be more confident no one has, would be to have predictable builds that you can recreate and then compare the file fingerprints. But I do not think that is possible, at least on android, as google holds they signature keys to apps.
Signal has reproducible builds and here’s the instruction how to check it on Android https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
Being prebuilt isn’t the same as open source! By that metric Linux is closed source because 99.9% of Linux users don’t build their own kernels (and those that do ought to shower anyway).
Even if that’s all true, it’s not evidence that the end to end encryption is broken.
That sort of debug access could simply be included in the clients.
I’m not sure if it’s the encryption part you don’t understand, the end to end, or both.
