WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app

Re:WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebo... by h_anna_h on Thursday January 07, 2021 @12:16PM (#25673880)

whatsapp and signal have forward secrecy, so if your private key is leaked it means that past conversations can't be decrypted. In reality it does not offer a lot of protection if you don't disable keeping logs (because losing your phone and malware are the only realistic ways of your private key being leaked). In addition the way that they have forward secrecy implemented it means that you have to decrypt every message posted in groupchats while you were offline sequently until the last one, which can take hours in an active (even if small) group if you are gone for a week. The other thing is that both of these apps to my knowledge do not warn you if a new key is added (I might be wrong here) so an active attacker can pretty much nullify the encryption, this is not an issue with openpgp.

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Re:WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebo... by dan-robertson on Thursday January 07, 2021 @02:27PM (#25675974)

To add to this: the point of the disappearing messages in signal is to enhance the value of the forward secrecy by not having the record of the messages (so long as both devices are using correct clients and no one is screenshotting messages.

The other feature is deniability: having an encrypted message and it’s decryption doesn’t give you any more information than a screenshot of the message in signal. There isn’t a way for the encrypted message to prove that it was legitimate as the previous keys are revealed in a way that means anyone sniffing the traffic could make a message encrypted with that key.

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Re:WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebo... by h_anna_h on Thursday January 07, 2021 @06:49PM (#25679343)

Afaik, the messages should be deniable as long as they are not signed, not sure how delta chat handles it though. Regarding deniability I personally would consider it as an anti-feature because the one receiving the message can't prove to the wider world that they received it from a certain person and similarly someone who is falsely accused of posting a certain message can't go and say "show the signatures of the messages or you are lying".

By the way, do you know if the one receiving the messages can force messages that are marked as "disappearing" to be kept?

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Re:WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebo... by dan-robertson on Friday January 08, 2021 @09:24AM (#25684980)

It is true that messages would be deniable if they weren’t authenticated. The design of signal’s protocol is such that messages are authenticated but deniable: it is possible for the recipient to determine that the message was genuine (the information you want to send) but it is not possible for a third party to prove that a message was authentic (the information you don’t want to leak).

See also, this article about doing the same for email: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/11/16/ok-googl...

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Re:WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebo... by h_anna_h on Friday January 08, 2021 @12:34PM (#25687234)

> The design of signal’s protocol is such that messages are authenticated but deniable: it is possible for the recipient to determine that the message was genuine

Via the use of MACs, yes. I never said otherwise. What I said before still holds, as the recipient you can't prove to others that you indeed received a message by a certain someone rather than forged it yourself to incriminate them.

> See also, this article about doing the same for email: https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2020/11/16/ok-googl...

The "Marisa" person in the comments is a friend of mine from IRC and I agree 100% with what she said.

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