Given that WhatsApp uses the signal protocol for its E2EE messages https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ the details in the lawsuit are not particularly compelling. I suppose if it has merit...
The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.
Given that WhatsApp uses the signal protocol for its E2EE messages https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ the details in the lawsuit are not particularly compelling. I suppose if it has merit it will come out in discovery.
E2EE is pointless if the implementation is a secret. WhatsApp can have perfect E2EE and still send messages (and anything else it has access to) over a completely different channel. Even if you...
E2EE is pointless if the implementation is a secret. WhatsApp can have perfect E2EE and still send messages (and anything else it has access to) over a completely different channel. Even if you analyze the traffic, it's probably very easy to disguise the leak as harmless telemetry.
My question is: If WA has E2EE, where are my pricvate keys? When I buy a new phone WA just works and I can see all the messages sent and received, thus they must be decrypted. Where did the keys...
My question is: If WA has E2EE, where are my pricvate keys? When I buy a new phone WA just works and I can see all the messages sent and received, thus they must be decrypted. Where did the keys come from then? If I'm not sole owner of the keys what is E2EE good for then?
There are absolutely procedures involved in switching WhatsApp to a new phone if you want access to your chat history. They have a few different ways to do this, but it absolutely is non-trivial...
There are absolutely procedures involved in switching WhatsApp to a new phone if you want access to your chat history. They have a few different ways to do this, but it absolutely is non-trivial for almost certainly this exact reason. According to Whatsapp's FAQs, there are three ways to do this on Android:
Account transfer
Google Account backups
Chat transfer
Both transferring the full account and transferring just the chat history require both phones being physically close together and having Wi-Fi on (but they don't need to be connected to a network to transfer chat history) and your scanning a QR code with the old phone. Presumably the encryption key already on your old phone would be used as needed in that process and the history and encryption key appear to be directly transferred between the devices in this case. Google Account backups can be (but apparently aren't necessarily) end-to-end encrypted, and when they are encrypted they require a password, encryption key, or passkey that you set up in advance.
I'll hold out on further evidence as this case progresses, as I don't think the currently available information is super convincing on its own. I'm very willing to believe Meta would do something shady on this front. But I don't think this particular argument is a good one.
I certainly fon't know how it goes in the background. But I would bet some money on the fact that you don't have control over your private encryption keys. I think Meta has them as well. If that...
I certainly fon't know how it goes in the background. But I would bet some money on the fact that you don't have control over your private encryption keys. I think Meta has them as well. If that really is the case then the question stands - what is E2EE good for then?
Or I'm in the wrong here and my question isn't valid. That may also be the case.
The crux of the lawsuit is that employees at WhatsApp can easily request access to chats. If it’s true, then yeah, Meta has access to those keys as well. But speaking without hiding my bias - for...
The crux of the lawsuit is that employees at WhatsApp can easily request access to chats. If it’s true, then yeah, Meta has access to those keys as well.
But speaking without hiding my bias - for me, Facebook (Meta) is the antithesis of privacy. I don’t trust that they would respect the privacy of their users in any of their products.
I dunno, it would be a pointless own-goal because you are already giving practically anything interesting away already in the form of your social graph and who you are talking to. I mean I...
I dunno, it would be a pointless own-goal because you are already giving practically anything interesting away already in the form of your social graph and who you are talking to.
I mean I wouldn't be shocked either way but the juice doesn't seem worth the squeeze (unless the squeeze was regulatory, which I guess it might well have been initially).
I don't trust Meta as far as I can throw them, so it's possible this lawsuit is legit and they do have copies of your private keys, but I'm not particularly convinced of that at this stage. I'm...
I don't trust Meta as far as I can throw them, so it's possible this lawsuit is legit and they do have copies of your private keys, but I'm not particularly convinced of that at this stage. I'm holding out on the lawsuit moving further and producing some actual evidence. So far it doesn't really have anything but claims without anything to back them up, but if these claims are true, it shouldn't be hard to produce evidence of this as the lawsuit proceeds. imo Meta has plenty to gain from harvesting information it can get without breaking its own E2EE, and honestly I just don't think it's worth it on their end. I'm very willing to be proven wrong, as Meta makes plenty of decisions I consider foolish and/or evil on a regular basis, but I need some sort of evidence first.
My main point in my comment above is that the ability to transfer your WhatsApp account to a new phone does not remotely serve as evidence that Meta is storing your keys somewhere in the cloud, and that what you claim about being able to just open your chats on a new phone is inaccurate, as you do need to undertake transfer procedures that are almost definitely directly using your private key locally. This doesn't necessarily mean the claims in the lawsuit aren't true (I'd expect this to be the case even if they are secretly storing your private key for internal use), but it doesn't serve as evidence for them whatsoever.
Your question is kind of ridiculous, though. If Meta has copies of your private keys, it simply isn't E2EE in any meaningful sense of the word. Even if they are lying about having E2EE, that doesn't entail that E2EE isn't valuable/useful to have.
I don't want to sound like someone who has evidence or is absolutely certain of something. It is just my own opinion on the situation that is not based on any evidence. I hope I don't present...
I don't want to sound like someone who has evidence or is absolutely certain of something. It is just my own opinion on the situation that is not based on any evidence. I hope I don't present myself and my opinins as something that is absolutely 100% thuth as I personally don't think it is 100% truth - I have no evidence to back such claim up. If I did sound like that, I apologize, it certainly wasn't my intent.
The ridiculous question - E2EE for me means it is encrypted on my device and decrypted on receiving device. In my eyes it is still E2EE even if someone else also owns the keys - in principle it is still encrypted on my side and decrypted on the other BUT someone else can also decrypt it along the way. Still the encryption from one end to the other is present. Maybe this is just abozt wording it. I don't want to cause some flame war as I think it is unnecessary.
I'm also looking forward on how it goes with the lawsuit.
If the intermediary has a copy of your keys, I'd argue it's not E2EE. It's merely E (encryption). How else would you differentiate between encryption and E2EE meaningfully?
If the intermediary has a copy of your keys, I'd argue it's not E2EE. It's merely E (encryption). How else would you differentiate between encryption and E2EE meaningfully?
Actually, I don't use WA. I have been that "expert" who set up the new phones a few times. If I recall correctly, you just input your phone number and the chats comes from the WA itself (cloud...
Actually, I don't use WA. I have been that "expert" who set up the new phones a few times. If I recall correctly, you just input your phone number and the chats comes from the WA itself (cloud backup on their side I presume).
I see, well I can tell you if you don't want to transfer accounts / retain messages it's really easy. Just don't set it up. There is no automatic restore without the user taking some action. Ofc...
I see, well I can tell you if you don't want to transfer accounts / retain messages it's really easy. Just don't set it up. There is no automatic restore without the user taking some action. Ofc that doesn't block meta from harvesting all the social graph / messaging meta data and the rest of it, but your keys / messages aren't leaving the device without user action, afaik.
It is trivially easy to look this up and this is not true. You can log into your account on a new device this way, but if you want your chat history the new phone, you need to go through the...
If I recall correctly, you just input your phone number and the chats comes from the WA itself (cloud backup on their side I presume).
It is trivially easy to look this up and this is not true. You can log into your account on a new device this way, but if you want your chat history the new phone, you need to go through the account transfer or chat transfer procedure (which based on its requirements, at least partially operates locally between the phones). Or you need to have a backup of your chat history that you made yourself. I have done this account transfer procedure myself, and it's not particularly difficult or time-consuming, so it's understandable that you wouldn't really remember it vividly, but you do absolutely need to do more than just input your phone number to get your chat history on a new device.
I think I can weigh in here with my own situation, and at least partially explain the difference between WhatsApp’s help articles and people’s actual lived experiences here. Two years ago, my...
I think I can weigh in here with my own situation, and at least partially explain the difference between WhatsApp’s help articles and people’s actual lived experiences here.
Two years ago, my iPhone stopped working because of water getting inside (despite being IP67 rated). Australia has very strong consumer protections, so I was able to walk into an Apple retailer, explain that my phone stopped working and was new enough to still be under warranty etc, and they handed me a new one. Important to note here that my old phone was dead and gone before they handed me the new one, so phone-to-phone transfer was not possible. My current phone has all the chats that my previous phones have had, so despite the unusable phone, I still have continuity and history.
In trying to piece together my own experience with what you’ve said here, I took a look at my settings within WhatsApp to see how I can have continuity despite claims of E2EE. I found a setting buried a few layers deep which backs up my message history to iCloud (Settings > Chats > Chat backup). This section includes frequency (daily/weekly/monthly) and a toggle for whether to also back up videos, and interestingly also a toggle for whether turn on E2EE for this back up or not. My settings when I checked were “monthly backup, without video, without E2EE”
I’ve stayed in the Apple ecosystem for a very long time now, so I can’t tell you if this was the default for a new user downloading WhatsApp for the first time or if it’s something I chose to do (or if it’s one of those nag settings that keeps telling you to “do X or be at risk of problems!” that companies love to use these days) but at the very least, this can explain why some* users have the experience of zero-effort continuity between phones.
Thank you for the explanation. My only quibble is that I would amend this to *some users, as I am also describing my actual lived experience, as I've used the account transfer procedure myself...
this can explain why users have the experience of zero-effort continuity between phones
Thank you for the explanation. My only quibble is that I would amend this to *some users, as I am also describing my actual lived experience, as I've used the account transfer procedure myself when switching (android) phones in the past (though atm it appears I have an automatic backup set up as well, so it may be that this is now the default in general, idk).
Ah, good spotting, I’ve made that edit now. I rewrote and restructured my comment a few times to soften it and make it less blunt, but also didn’t have 100% mental resources to bring it to a place...
Ah, good spotting, I’ve made that edit now.
I rewrote and restructured my comment a few times to soften it and make it less blunt, but also didn’t have 100% mental resources to bring it to a place I was totally happy with. I ultimately posted with the mindset of “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” so apologies for the outcome that I wasn’t as (gentle? Considerate? Generous?) good as I would have liked to be.
If iOS, it's automatic. I bought a new iPhone recently and I didn't have to do anything, the chat history was automatically imported. I'm guessing that WhatsApp for iOS might use icloud for this....
If iOS, it's automatic. I bought a new iPhone recently and I didn't have to do anything, the chat history was automatically imported.
I'm guessing that WhatsApp for iOS might use icloud for this.
If @Pavouk106 helped someone with an iPhone, this might be why he remembers not doing anything
Since one of the options for Android is to make a backup with Google cloud (which can be encrypted or not), I similarly suspect the users in question had some sort of automatic backup to iCloud...
Since one of the options for Android is to make a backup with Google cloud (which can be encrypted or not), I similarly suspect the users in question had some sort of automatic backup to iCloud set up or something (or even that something like that is turned on by default in the iOS version). I don't have any experience with someone who both uses an iPhone and has a WhatsApp account. WhatsApp's website does still direct iOS users to do the account transfer procedure with a QR code, but these are probably different routes to the same result.
I'm wondering if, and maybe it's different in the US vs EU or something, the Android app uses your Google Account in a similar way if you consent to it? (I can see why one shouldn't but I bet...
I'm wondering if, and maybe it's different in the US vs EU or something, the Android app uses your Google Account in a similar way if you consent to it? (I can see why one shouldn't but I bet folks would)
you can make a backup of your chat history to your Google account. That's explicitly presented as one of the options. I'm not actually sure how transparent that option is to the average user, but...
you can make a backup of your chat history to your Google account. That's explicitly presented as one of the options. I'm not actually sure how transparent that option is to the average user, but it's definitely there.
I think at least most of what’s app is E2EE, but I remember years ago someone pointed out that forwarded photos and videos seem to be forwarded instantly, rather than being re-uploaded. I do...
I think at least most of what’s app is E2EE, but I remember years ago someone pointed out that forwarded photos and videos seem to be forwarded instantly, rather than being re-uploaded. I do wonder how this could be implemented with e2ee, unless they share the key to the photo with each party it’s sent to? But then that doesn’t seem e2ee, as it would be trivial to intercept.
Signal details how they handle attachments somewhat in this blog. full text of relevant section The simple guess would be that WhatsApp uses a similar process, since they use the Signal protocol....
Signal details how they handle attachments somewhat in this blog.
full text of relevant section
When something big needs to be sent through Signal, we send it as an attachment. Big things include photos, videos, files, and really long text messages. Even the end-to-end encrypted archives that are transferred from the primary device to the new linked device — as mentioned in the previous section — are sent as attachments.
Let’s say that someone wants to send a friend a picture of their cat on Signal. To make this happen quickly and easily, instead of sending the large image directly inside a Signal message, Signal encrypts the cat pic and uploads it to a file server. To ensure that the intended recipient (and only the intended recipient) can see the cat pic, the sender shares a decryption key and the download location for the uploaded cat pic in a specially formatted Signal message. The sender can re-use the same location and key across multiple messages for each of the recipient’s linked devices, but the sender only needs to upload the large file once.
This speeds up the process of sending big things on Signal, while ensuring that only the intended recipient with the decryption key for the attachment can ever access it. We’re so serious about this level of privacy that all encrypted attachments are also padded to prevent those without the decryption key from determining the exact size of the encrypted attachment.
That’s how attachments are sent in Signal, to ensure privacy and speed. But of course we don’t want to hold onto that cat picture on our file servers forever, even if it’s end-to-end encrypted. The Signal servers automatically delete encrypted attachments 45 days after they are uploaded.
This follows from how Signal delivers your messages. Each device on a Signal account has its own mailbox. Devices are always retrieving messages from their mailbox when they are online, and as soon as the device confirms they’ve gotten a message, it is deleted from the Signal servers.
If a device has been offline for a while, it may have a lot of messages waiting in its mailbox when it returns. Today, Signal will hold a message in a device’s mailbox for up to 45 days, giving an idle device a chance to wake up and fetch it.
Since we know a message is only available for 45 days after it is sent, we assume that if a device hasn’t retrieved the attachment after 45 days, it won’t ever retrieve it.
It’d be nice if we could know when everyone has received your cat picture so we could delete the attachment earlier. But, we really don’t want to know who’s downloading a particular attachment and when, so we don’t track that. In general, we can’t tell who received an attachment pointer, how many received it, which message(s) included it, and who downloaded it — we’d like to keep it that way. So we always delete end-to-end encrypted attachments 45 days after they are uploaded.
The simple guess would be that WhatsApp uses a similar process, since they use the Signal protocol. Exact implementation may vary of course.
that doesn’t seem e2ee, as it would be trivial to intercept.
Only insomuch as your typical Signal text messages are trivial to intercept, as the content of your messages should be E2EE. In this case, that should be the attachment containing the media location and decryption key.
I'm far from an expert, so this is an educated guess based on available information. Feel free to correct if you have experience in this domain.
Do you have any reason to believe most of WhatsApp is E2EE - beyond Meta say it is - or is this an assumption? Meta have been repeatedly shown to lie when it serves them; see repeated denial of...
Do you have any reason to believe most of WhatsApp is E2EE - beyond Meta say it is - or is this an assumption?
Meta have been repeatedly shown to lie when it serves them; see repeated denial of correlation between social media use and a decline in teen mental health despite published evidence (if I recall correctly:) demonstrating causality, and it recently coming out that there is intentional design targetting making social media particularly addictive to teen users.
It’s one of the most used apps out there - three billion users, about a third of the entire planet - and a huge number of security researchers are actively looking at its behaviour, trying to hack...
It’s one of the most used apps out there - three billion users, about a third of the entire planet - and a huge number of security researchers are actively looking at its behaviour, trying to hack it, trying to reverse engineer it, trying to interoperate with it (some even with Meta’s begrudging blessing, thanks to the EU) etc. etc.
That’s not to say it couldn’t be sending the keys in some subtle way, and I have absolutely zero trust in Meta, but after seeing enough absolutely insanely subtle vulnerabilities in much more niche software picked up and presented at Defcon, I’d say balance of probabilities is that a target this size is probably fine if we haven’t heard otherwise. I still use Signal and try to convince everyone I can to do the same, though!
Given that WhatsApp uses the signal protocol for its E2EE messages https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/ the details in the lawsuit are not particularly compelling. I suppose if it has merit it will come out in discovery.
E2EE is pointless if the implementation is a secret. WhatsApp can have perfect E2EE and still send messages (and anything else it has access to) over a completely different channel. Even if you analyze the traffic, it's probably very easy to disguise the leak as harmless telemetry.
My question is: If WA has E2EE, where are my pricvate keys? When I buy a new phone WA just works and I can see all the messages sent and received, thus they must be decrypted. Where did the keys come from then? If I'm not sole owner of the keys what is E2EE good for then?
There are absolutely procedures involved in switching WhatsApp to a new phone if you want access to your chat history. They have a few different ways to do this, but it absolutely is non-trivial for almost certainly this exact reason. According to Whatsapp's FAQs, there are three ways to do this on Android:
Both transferring the full account and transferring just the chat history require both phones being physically close together and having Wi-Fi on (but they don't need to be connected to a network to transfer chat history) and your scanning a QR code with the old phone. Presumably the encryption key already on your old phone would be used as needed in that process and the history and encryption key appear to be directly transferred between the devices in this case. Google Account backups can be (but apparently aren't necessarily) end-to-end encrypted, and when they are encrypted they require a password, encryption key, or passkey that you set up in advance.
I'll hold out on further evidence as this case progresses, as I don't think the currently available information is super convincing on its own. I'm very willing to believe Meta would do something shady on this front. But I don't think this particular argument is a good one.
I certainly fon't know how it goes in the background. But I would bet some money on the fact that you don't have control over your private encryption keys. I think Meta has them as well. If that really is the case then the question stands - what is E2EE good for then?
Or I'm in the wrong here and my question isn't valid. That may also be the case.
The crux of the lawsuit is that employees at WhatsApp can easily request access to chats. If it’s true, then yeah, Meta has access to those keys as well.
But speaking without hiding my bias - for me, Facebook (Meta) is the antithesis of privacy. I don’t trust that they would respect the privacy of their users in any of their products.
I dunno, it would be a pointless own-goal because you are already giving practically anything interesting away already in the form of your social graph and who you are talking to.
I mean I wouldn't be shocked either way but the juice doesn't seem worth the squeeze (unless the squeeze was regulatory, which I guess it might well have been initially).
I don't trust them either, which I probably already gave away.
I don't trust Meta as far as I can throw them, so it's possible this lawsuit is legit and they do have copies of your private keys, but I'm not particularly convinced of that at this stage. I'm holding out on the lawsuit moving further and producing some actual evidence. So far it doesn't really have anything but claims without anything to back them up, but if these claims are true, it shouldn't be hard to produce evidence of this as the lawsuit proceeds. imo Meta has plenty to gain from harvesting information it can get without breaking its own E2EE, and honestly I just don't think it's worth it on their end. I'm very willing to be proven wrong, as Meta makes plenty of decisions I consider foolish and/or evil on a regular basis, but I need some sort of evidence first.
My main point in my comment above is that the ability to transfer your WhatsApp account to a new phone does not remotely serve as evidence that Meta is storing your keys somewhere in the cloud, and that what you claim about being able to just open your chats on a new phone is inaccurate, as you do need to undertake transfer procedures that are almost definitely directly using your private key locally. This doesn't necessarily mean the claims in the lawsuit aren't true (I'd expect this to be the case even if they are secretly storing your private key for internal use), but it doesn't serve as evidence for them whatsoever.
Your question is kind of ridiculous, though. If Meta has copies of your private keys, it simply isn't E2EE in any meaningful sense of the word. Even if they are lying about having E2EE, that doesn't entail that E2EE isn't valuable/useful to have.
I don't want to sound like someone who has evidence or is absolutely certain of something. It is just my own opinion on the situation that is not based on any evidence. I hope I don't present myself and my opinins as something that is absolutely 100% thuth as I personally don't think it is 100% truth - I have no evidence to back such claim up. If I did sound like that, I apologize, it certainly wasn't my intent.
The ridiculous question - E2EE for me means it is encrypted on my device and decrypted on receiving device. In my eyes it is still E2EE even if someone else also owns the keys - in principle it is still encrypted on my side and decrypted on the other BUT someone else can also decrypt it along the way. Still the encryption from one end to the other is present. Maybe this is just abozt wording it. I don't want to cause some flame war as I think it is unnecessary.
I'm also looking forward on how it goes with the lawsuit.
If the intermediary has a copy of your keys, I'd argue it's not E2EE. It's merely E (encryption). How else would you differentiate between encryption and E2EE meaningfully?
The "end-to-end" part of E2EE requires that no one can decrypt it "in the middle". That's what that part of the phrase specifically refers to.
Do you have a cloud backup for your messages? I don't, when I switch phones I have nothing.
Actually, I don't use WA. I have been that "expert" who set up the new phones a few times. If I recall correctly, you just input your phone number and the chats comes from the WA itself (cloud backup on their side I presume).
I see, well I can tell you if you don't want to transfer accounts / retain messages it's really easy. Just don't set it up. There is no automatic restore without the user taking some action. Ofc that doesn't block meta from harvesting all the social graph / messaging meta data and the rest of it, but your keys / messages aren't leaving the device without user action, afaik.
It is trivially easy to look this up and this is not true. You can log into your account on a new device this way, but if you want your chat history the new phone, you need to go through the account transfer or chat transfer procedure (which based on its requirements, at least partially operates locally between the phones). Or you need to have a backup of your chat history that you made yourself. I have done this account transfer procedure myself, and it's not particularly difficult or time-consuming, so it's understandable that you wouldn't really remember it vividly, but you do absolutely need to do more than just input your phone number to get your chat history on a new device.
I think I can weigh in here with my own situation, and at least partially explain the difference between WhatsApp’s help articles and people’s actual lived experiences here.
Two years ago, my iPhone stopped working because of water getting inside (despite being IP67 rated). Australia has very strong consumer protections, so I was able to walk into an Apple retailer, explain that my phone stopped working and was new enough to still be under warranty etc, and they handed me a new one. Important to note here that my old phone was dead and gone before they handed me the new one, so phone-to-phone transfer was not possible. My current phone has all the chats that my previous phones have had, so despite the unusable phone, I still have continuity and history.
In trying to piece together my own experience with what you’ve said here, I took a look at my settings within WhatsApp to see how I can have continuity despite claims of E2EE. I found a setting buried a few layers deep which backs up my message history to iCloud (Settings > Chats > Chat backup). This section includes frequency (daily/weekly/monthly) and a toggle for whether to also back up videos, and interestingly also a toggle for whether turn on E2EE for this back up or not. My settings when I checked were “monthly backup, without video, without E2EE”
I’ve stayed in the Apple ecosystem for a very long time now, so I can’t tell you if this was the default for a new user downloading WhatsApp for the first time or if it’s something I chose to do (or if it’s one of those nag settings that keeps telling you to “do X or be at risk of problems!” that companies love to use these days) but at the very least, this can explain why some* users have the experience of zero-effort continuity between phones.
*edited to add in “some”
Thank you for the explanation. My only quibble is that I would amend this to *some users, as I am also describing my actual lived experience, as I've used the account transfer procedure myself when switching (android) phones in the past (though atm it appears I have an automatic backup set up as well, so it may be that this is now the default in general, idk).
Ah, good spotting, I’ve made that edit now.
I rewrote and restructured my comment a few times to soften it and make it less blunt, but also didn’t have 100% mental resources to bring it to a place I was totally happy with. I ultimately posted with the mindset of “don’t let perfect be the enemy of good” so apologies for the outcome that I wasn’t as
(gentle? Considerate? Generous?)good as I would have liked to be.no worries! your comment actually did make what's going on a lot clearer to me
If iOS, it's automatic. I bought a new iPhone recently and I didn't have to do anything, the chat history was automatically imported.
I'm guessing that WhatsApp for iOS might use icloud for this.
If @Pavouk106 helped someone with an iPhone, this might be why he remembers not doing anything
Since one of the options for Android is to make a backup with Google cloud (which can be encrypted or not), I similarly suspect the users in question had some sort of automatic backup to iCloud set up or something (or even that something like that is turned on by default in the iOS version). I don't have any experience with someone who both uses an iPhone and has a WhatsApp account. WhatsApp's website does still direct iOS users to do the account transfer procedure with a QR code, but these are probably different routes to the same result.
I did two Androids and one iPhone past year or two. I will likely do another this year. I will pay more attention next time.
I'm wondering if, and maybe it's different in the US vs EU or something, the Android app uses your Google Account in a similar way if you consent to it? (I can see why one shouldn't but I bet folks would)
you can make a backup of your chat history to your Google account. That's explicitly presented as one of the options. I'm not actually sure how transparent that option is to the average user, but it's definitely there.
Got it, makes sense and it might be why the experience of reinstalling is different for folks
I will pay close attention on how the process goes next time. I don't want to share wrong information in the future.
...then why did you say "When I buy a new phone WA just works and I can see all the messages sent and received"?
Because I'm the "tech wizard" in my family who does this stuff for others. I just badly phrased my comment.
I think at least most of what’s app is E2EE, but I remember years ago someone pointed out that forwarded photos and videos seem to be forwarded instantly, rather than being re-uploaded. I do wonder how this could be implemented with e2ee, unless they share the key to the photo with each party it’s sent to? But then that doesn’t seem e2ee, as it would be trivial to intercept.
Signal details how they handle attachments somewhat in this blog.
full text of relevant section
The simple guess would be that WhatsApp uses a similar process, since they use the Signal protocol. Exact implementation may vary of course.
Only insomuch as your typical Signal text messages are trivial to intercept, as the content of your messages should be E2EE. In this case, that should be the attachment containing the media location and decryption key.
I'm far from an expert, so this is an educated guess based on available information. Feel free to correct if you have experience in this domain.
Thank you, that makes sense as an implementation, good link!
Do you have any reason to believe most of WhatsApp is E2EE - beyond Meta say it is - or is this an assumption?
Meta have been repeatedly shown to lie when it serves them; see repeated denial of correlation between social media use and a decline in teen mental health despite published evidence (if I recall correctly:) demonstrating causality, and it recently coming out that there is intentional design targetting making social media particularly addictive to teen users.
It’s one of the most used apps out there - three billion users, about a third of the entire planet - and a huge number of security researchers are actively looking at its behaviour, trying to hack it, trying to reverse engineer it, trying to interoperate with it (some even with Meta’s begrudging blessing, thanks to the EU) etc. etc.
That’s not to say it couldn’t be sending the keys in some subtle way, and I have absolutely zero trust in Meta, but after seeing enough absolutely insanely subtle vulnerabilities in much more niche software picked up and presented at Defcon, I’d say balance of probabilities is that a target this size is probably fine if we haven’t heard otherwise. I still use Signal and try to convince everyone I can to do the same, though!
[Edit] Clarity