Moxie Marlinspike: There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'

by Volker Weber

We believe that it is important to honestly and accurately evaluate the choices that organizations like WhatsApp or Facebook make. There are many things to criticize Facebook for; running a product that deployed end-to-end encryption by default for over a billion people is not one of them.

We believe that WhatsApp remains a great choice for users concerned with the privacy of their message content.

Moxie calls out The Guardian for their reporting. This developing story also demonstrates something that irritates me in the security scene. There are those like Moxie who create secure systems. And then there are those who create strange edge cases to demonstrate their prowess and make sweeping allegations from there.

The issue with Facebook/Whatsapp is not that they snoop in on your conversation. They can do that in your Facebook posts, likes, and such. The real issue is that they mine your social connections to deliver their advertisement product. But you cannot take offense here when you are using customer loyalty programs at the same time.

It is great that the Guardian thinks privacy is something their readers should be concerned about. However, running a story like this without taking the time to carefully evaluate claims of a "backdoor" will ultimately only hurt their readers. It has the potential to drive them away from a well engineered and carefully considered system to much more dangerous products that make truly false claims.

Signal is not one of those dangerous products. It's the original implementation of the secure protocol.

Comments

Sounds like WhatsApp and Signal are going to become more similar:

"In an interview, Marlinspike said Signal was in the process of moving away from strictly enforced blocking. He also said that WhatsApp takes strict precautions to prevent its servers from knowing which users have enabled security notifications, making it impossible for would-be attackers to target only those who have them turned off."

(http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2017/01/whatsapp-and-friends-take-umbrage-at-report-its-crypto-is-backdoored/)

John Keys, 2017-01-14

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