WhisperSystems designed good protocols, but I am afraid that Moxie was too anxious to release this info and hit ENTER key too early :-) I am quite skeptical about the actual value from the security point of this press release. WhisperSystems reports about end-to-end encryption, that means, I encrypt my message with an encryption key that only you or both of us know. 1. How can we negotiate that key? Users are not involved, but everything happens automatically, under the hood, between two whatsapp clients. How? they negotiate the encryption keys through whatsapp servers: is it my own key or the NSA one? are they leaking the key to Facebook? 2. We do need to authenticate the identity, eg: via QR code, fingerprint, spell it loudly on the phone, etc.., which reduces usability, especially for mass market. 3. Last but not least: even if we authenticated identities and keys, how can we be sure that whatsapp client is really using the authenticated keys and not the NSA keys, maybe only on a white list of suspected mobile phone numbers? above all, they provide a proprietary and closed source app The security model is faulted, at the root level: - If I subscribe to a security service - such as messaging -, the service provider is untrusted by default. I need total transparency -> every single components in the architecture should be auditable and open source - If mobile app is closed source, I can trust only the infrastructure that should be under my full control, to be sure that no information leak outside infrastructure is ever possible. My 2 cents Marco 2014-11-19 7:25 GMT+01:00 Eric Mill <eric@konklone.com>:
This was honestly just about as exciting as the new EFF/Mozilla/Akamai/etc CA. Strong encryption with no UX degradation, for *so* many people, and the post certainly indicates it'll be going into the rest of WhatsApp's native applications.
I'm sure this fed into improvements into the TextSecure protocol, and that the PR will help WhisperSystems obtain more partnerships like this. A great day for the TS project.
On Tue, Nov 18, 2014 at 6:35 PM, rysiek <rysiek@hackerspace.pl> wrote:
Well,
I didn't see THAT coming: https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/
-- Pozdr rysiek
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