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.
What in the world are you talking about here, bud? Your comments are making zero sense.
Look, seriously, if my comment is being upvoted, it’s because I responded to yours, and people understand what I am saying in response.
You, unfortunately, clearly do not understand what I’m saying because you do not grasp how any of this works.
Lmao, sure buddy pat yourself on the back because you got upvotes.
You’re talking about E2E encryption as if it prevents
side-channelclient side attacks, but sure morons will upvotes because they also don’t understand real world security.The only useful thing you’ve pointed out in your deluge of spam, is that Signal builds are reproducible which does protect against the attack described (as long as there isn’t a backdoor in the published code)
That’s literally what E2E encryption does. In order to attack it from outside you would have to break the encryption itself, and modern encryption is so robust that it would require quantum computing to break, and that capability hasn’t been developed yet.
The only reason the other commenter’s words sound like spam to you is because you don’t understand it, which you plainly reveal when you say "(as long as there isn’t a backdoor in the published [audited] code)
E2E encryption doesn’t prevent client side attacks, I misspoke when I called it a side channel attack, and ultimately Signal code is audited, so Signal is more secure, but people are mistaking a client-side exploit (sent from Meta’s servers to the WhatsApp client) with breaking E2E encryption of whatsapp, which is not what is described in the article.
It sounds like you’re contradicting yourself now. You’re right, signal is more secure because its source code is open-source and auditable. So what’s the issue? It seems you’ve been arguing otherwise, and you’re just now coming around to it without admitting that you were wrong in the first place.
The client-side app is also open-source and auditable, and you can monitor outgoing traffic on your devise to see whether the signal app is sending data that it shouldn’t. It sounds like people have verified that it doesn’t do that, but if you don’t want to take their word for it then why don’t you see for yourself?
I didn’t realize Signal now has reproducible builds (in my defense it didn’t when it launched)
This is mostly useless as the traffic signal is sending is encrypted, so you really have to just trust the code.
If it’s sending 0.0kb of background data, then the client is not communicating clandestinely with the server.
Sure but it by necessity sends some encrypted data to the server, Wireshark isn’t going to tell you if that’s just your message or your message and additional information.
Do you know what size channel attacks are? Because nothing you’ve even tried to bring up describes one at all, or how it applies to your original comments.
Yeah a size channel attack is when a poster can’t let go of how small their dick is so talks about how great Signal is all day.