Re:Viber adds end-to-end encryption
by CiPHPerCoder on Tuesday April 19, 2016 @10:50AM
(#11527365)
> I don't think I get your complaint
> Without open-sourcing the crypto, they could be just doing rot16($message) for all we know.
There are two things you can do:
1. Watch the outbound traffic and attempt known-plaintext attacks
2. Reverse engineer the app
Neither is particularly difficult. Most Android apps are trivial to break apart using Lobotomy. A large swath of software security folks specialize in binary auditing.
Has anyone done that and produced a fully open source app to connect to whatsapp?
Lots of people.
https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup for example
Looks like WhatsApp isn't so happy about that ...
https://gigaom.com/2015/01/20/whatsapp-cracks-down-on-people...
Do you know if the clients work with the new encryption?
Without open-sourcing the crypto, they could be just doing rot16($message) for all we know. Open-source is a requirement for being considered secure. It doesn't mean they aren't secure if they aren't open-source, but that you shouldn't consider it so, because you don't know if it is or not.