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Re:WhatsApp Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption to Its Over 1B U... by sickbeard on Friday April 08, 2016 @08:13AM (#11454035)
No but to blindly trust in it is silly. Even openssl had a heart-bleed bug that persisted for years without most people realizing it. All it takes is one bug for the entire thing to be useless.
Re:WhatsApp Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption to Its Over 1B U... by vulpino on Friday April 08, 2016 @08:19AM (#11454068)
And heartbleed is also than example of open source not being totally secure. It was a bug that persisted for years before it was found - and OpenSSL is open source.

It's just as foolish to blindly trust OSS. There will always be holes - the main point to OSS is not to combat these, as they will exist regardless. Rather, it is so one might know exactly what they're installing/using, without having to trust the corporation behind it.

Re:WhatsApp Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption to Its Over 1B U... by sickbeard on Friday April 08, 2016 @09:23AM (#11454444)
no it's foolish to trust something that hasn't been independently reviewed. How can EFF recommend something that hasn't even been subjected to an independent security audit?
Re:WhatsApp Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption to Its Over 1B U... by zdkl on Friday April 08, 2016 @08:19AM (#11454066)
The goal is not to be perfect, but to kickstart encryption adoption by a large non technical audience I believe.

Sure that's no excuse for potentially bad crypto but it's worth it if this gets proper infosec into the public reach in the end. I'm confident this is a first step to having trustable encryption "in the real world" even if it's another client/company providing it later. Call me an optimist :)

Re:WhatsApp Rolls Out End-To-End Encryption to Its Over 1B U... by pdkl95 on Friday April 08, 2016 @08:27AM (#11454109)
> one bug

Everything can have bugs. The problem with this software is that it's a centralized single point of failure. Only a proper federated protocol can be resistant to subversion by business, government, or other interests.