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.
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.