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.
You’re just replacing trust in Meta with trust in Signal Inc without understanding why WhatsApp is vulnerable to this.
Is Signal Inc more trustworthy than Meta? probably
is Signal (app) safe from the attack described? absolutely not.
Theoretically, you can check the code actually running on the Signal servers is the code they publish under a free and open source licence, using the hardware-based TEE attestations the servers will return
Someone more knowledgeable than me may have managed to do so, I haven’t.
Tell me you don’t understand how Signal’s E2E mechanism works without telling me you don’t understand how Signal’s E2E mechanism works.
Tell me you don’t understand what E2E encryption is without telling me you don’t understand that the limits of E2E encryption.
This is key and I don’t think Signal shies away from this. You MUST trust the code you’re running. We know there are unofficial Signal builds. You must trust them. Why? Because think of it this way. You’re running a build of Signal, you type a messages. In code that text you type then gets run through Signal’s encryption. If you’re running a non-trustworthy build, they have access to the clear text before encryption, obviously. They can encrypt it twice, once with their key and once with yours, send it to a server, decrypt theirs and send yours on to it’s destination. (for example, there’s more ways than this).
See every other comment in this thread describing in great detail why you are wrong, but that you fundamentally DO NOT UNDERSTAND how any of this works whatsoever.
You fundamentally DO NOT UNDERSTAND how security works, go play with your algorithms and stop spamming my replies.
Um, security is based largely on encryption algorithms.