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A comment on Tunneling Internet through WhatsApp to get around network data usage limits. Parent comment

Re:Tunneling Internet through WhatsApp to get around network... by kevincox on Saturday November 12, 2022 @06:36AM (#33572155)
Since WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted you can probably just send bibary data. Stick a prefix on it so that the real client is guaranteed to ignore it as corrupted.

I think the only risk is that if you have a real client running it reports the invalid messages and WhatsApp uses this as a signal to van your account.

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Re:Tunneling Internet through WhatsApp to get around network... by staindk on Saturday November 12, 2022 @07:18AM (#33572369)
Note AFAIK WA is e2e encrypted BUT they can flag any weird looking messages (weird patterns etc) to see and review their contents.

So I think Meta/WA can opt to decrypt any suspicious messages they come across.

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Re:Tunneling Internet through WhatsApp to get around network... by bmicraft on Saturday November 12, 2022 @08:13AM (#33572716)
How would that work? Do they send a request to your phone to decrypt it for them?
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Re:Tunneling Internet through WhatsApp to get around network... by wongarsu on Saturday November 12, 2022 @09:51AM (#33573581)
I'd imagine the app just flags suspicious messages and sends them directly to review, in parallel to sending the encrypted message to the receiver
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Re:Tunneling Internet through WhatsApp to get around network... by preisschild on Saturday November 12, 2022 @01:47PM (#33575812)
Meta/Facebook is the last company I would trust regarding their E2EE. They probably have a key themselves.
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Re:Tunneling Internet through WhatsApp to get around network... by orestarod on Saturday November 12, 2022 @07:58PM (#33578864)
The E2EE here is not about privacy, but about being able to send whatever data you want (like binary) since WhatsApp will only see one type of data (encrypted) in transit, in contrast to needing to send data in a specific format to have it transferred at all. Meta can peek at the original "messages" all they want, they will see encrypted packet data anyway.
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