Re:EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]
by BlueTemplar on Sunday November 08, 2020 @06:51PM
(#25030178)
Would it? This kind of transmission of messages could be hidden alongside legitimate looking traffic like updates...
Re:EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]
by m4rtink on Sunday November 08, 2020 @08:18PM
(#25030555)
Also wven if it does not exhilarated user data now, it's one update from doing that tomorrow. Quite possible even via a targeted update on some specific people "not in favor".
If it was open source there is some chance a backdoor would be spotted (eq. by Linux distropackage msintainers), but not when a company is pushing obfuscated binary blobs preatty much directly to users.
Re:EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]
by floatboth on Sunday November 08, 2020 @08:41PM
(#25030645)
Well, not directly, for most people that would be via Apple/Google stores.
And of course these stores could have secret functionality for shipping targeted updates.
But if it exists, this means that 1) none of the developers working on the store backend decided to leak info about it and 2) none of the targets have had an expert look at their device to find an unusual update that wasn't seen by anyone else.
Over time, the probability of either of those things happening would be going up…
Re:EU Draft Council Declaration Against Encryption [pdf]
by BlueTemplar on Monday November 09, 2020 @04:11AM
(#25032861)
I picked updates as an example, but that's likely not the only communication that WhatsApp has with its servers ?
Having the higher-level source code just makes it a lot easier.
But if WhatsApp did this, it would probably be noticed pretty quickly by experts. But like I said above, Whatsapp's achilles heel isn't really the E2E encryption. It's the cloud backups.