Growing up in Soviet Ukraine in the 1980s, Whatsapp founder Jan Koum learned to distrust the
government and detest its surveillance. After he
emigrated to the U.S. and created his ultra-popular
messaging system decades later, he vowed that
Whatsapp would never make eavesdropping easy
for anyone. Now, Whatsapp is following through on
that anti-snooping promise at an unprecedented
scale.

On Tuesday, Whatsapp announced that it’s
implementing end-to-end encryption, an upgrade
to its privacy protections that makes it nearly
impossible for anyone to read users’ messages—
even the company itself. Whatsapp will integrate
the open-source software Textsecure, created by
privacy-focused non-profit Open Whisper Systems,
which scrambles messages with a cryptographic
key that only the user can access and never leaves
his or her device. The result is practically
uncrackable encryption for hundreds of
millions of phones and tablets that have
Whatsapp installed—by some measures the
world’s largest-ever implementation of this
standard of encryption in a messaging
service.

“Whatsapp is integrating Textsecure into the most
popular messaging app in the world, where people
exchange billions of messages a day,” says Moxie
Marlinspike, Open Whisper System’s creator and a
well known software developer in the cryptography
community. “I do think this is the largest
deployment of end-to-end encryption ever.”

Textsecure has actually already been quietly
encrypting Whatsapp messages between Android
devices for a week. The new encryption scheme
means Whatsapp messages will now travel all the
way to the recipients’ device before being
decrypted, rather than merely being encrypted
between the user’s device and Whatsapp’s server.
The change is nearly invisible, though Marlinspike
says Whatsapp will soon add a feature to allow
users to verify each others’ identities based on
their cryptographic key, a defense against man-in-
the-middle attacks that intercept conversations.
“Ordinary users won’t know the difference,” says
Marlinspike. “It’s totally frictionless.”

In its initial phase, though, Whatsapp’s messaging
encryption is limited to Android, and doesn’t yet
apply to group messages, photos or video
messages. Marlinspike says that Whatsapp plans
to expand its Textsecure rollout into those other
features and other platforms, including Apple’s
iOS, soon. He wouldn’t specify an exact time frame,
and Whatsapp staffers declined to comment on the
new encryption features. Marlinspike says the
Textsecure implementation has been in the works
for six months, since shortly after Whatsapp was
acquired by Facebook last February.

Whatsapp’s Android users alone represent a
massive new user base for end-to-end encrypted
messaging: Whatsapp’s page in the Google Play
store lists more than 500 million downloads.
Textsecure had previously been installed on only
around 10 million gadgets running the Cyanogen
mod variant of Android and about 500,000 other
devices.

The only encrypted messaging system that
compares in size is Apple’s iMessage, which also
claims to use a version of end-to-end encryption.
Compared with Textsecure, however, Apple’s
iMessage security has some serious shortcomings.
iMessage doesn’t track which devices’
cryptographic keys are associated with a certain
user, so Apple could simply create a new key the
user wasn’t aware of to start intercepting his or her
messages. Additionally, many users unwittingly
back up their stored iMessages to Apple’s iCloud,
which renders any end-to-end encryption moot.

Plus, unlike Textsecure, iMessage doesn’t use a
feature called “forward secrecy” that creates a new
encryption key for each message sent. This means
that anyone who collects a user’s encrypted
messages and successfully cracks a user’s key can
decrypt all their communications, not just the one
message that uses that key.

Whatsapp’s rollout of strong encryption to
hundreds of millions of users may be an unpopular
move among governments around the world,
whose surveillance it could make far more difficult.
Whatsapp’s user base is highly international, with
large populations of users in Europe and India. But
Whatsapp founder Jan Koum has been vocal about
his opposition to cooperating with government
snooping. “I grew up in a society where everything
you did was eavesdropped on, recorded, snitched
on,” he told Wired UK earlier this year. “Nobody
should have the right to eavesdrop, or you become
a totalitarian state—the kind of state I escaped as a
kid to come to this country where you have
democracy and freedom of speech. Our goal is to
protect it.”




www.gurusloaded.com/tech-whatsapp-switched-on-end-to-end-encryption-for-hundreds-of-millions-of-users/

That's cool. Though it will be cracked.

Whatever.

If only the Nigerian Security service could eavesdrop...

Good. Nice thought of them.

This wouldn't go down well with a lot of Government .....Let's see who ban's whatsapp first

In as much as it's a welcome development, the security situation of the country gives me a mix-feeling towards it. Like u said, I'm waiting for who ban whatsapp first.

Mrkuvuki:
This wouldn't go down well with a lot of Government .....Let's see who ban's whatsapp first

Mtschewwwww

I love that

ZUBY77:
That's cool. Though it will be cracked.

not so easy, AES-256 is very secure.

chidibond:
If only the Nigerian Security service could eavesdrop...

well they are currently busy doing something else ... upgrading their schemes and formats on how to collect money from drivers at road blocks

We'll wait and see!!!

I was here

FemoLondon:
not so easy, AES-256 is very secure.

Relax.. Nothing is that secured.. Not even something inside the human head..

ZUBY77:


Relax.. Nothing is that secured.. Not even something inside the human head..

??