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.
They share it with you. Their public key is generated by them. You encrypt a message to them with their public key. They use their private key to decrypt it.
I want to add before I get completely roasted here, that this is intentionally reductive. Signal actually uses a much more interesting multikey sharing algorithm, double ratchet. This uses onetime keypairs, and really is worth reading about.
Is that vulnerable to an attack if a hacker gets their public key and intercepts the data traffic? Or can it only be used to encrypt but not decrypt?
Or are the added layers of complexity designed specifically to prevent that from happening?
This is why I like open-source, because people who know more about it than I do can check everything over and say whether it’s good.
Actually great questions. Yes and no. There are vulnerabilities if the private key leaks, but public keys are just that; perfectly okay public in any hands. You only encrypt data with it.
What makes the Signal protocol so awesome, and other algorithms like it, is that it reduces the threat surface area further by using onetime keys. So even if your key is leaked, it cannot be used to decrypt old or forthcoming messages as the keys have already ratcheted to the next pair.
That’s so interesting. Data kind of blows my mind. Like, how could all that information travel over wires or through the air and not get mixed up with other information on its way to its destination?
Now you’re getting into “go download the TCP/IP Guide book” type territory lol. Networking is a fascinating subject.