u21day:
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.”
http://www.wired.com/2014/11/whatsapp-encrypted-messaging/ Pls summarize it....the story is too much.  |
Phones › Re: All GTB Bank Users Can Now Buy Airtime Directly From Your Phone *737*amount# by CuteDude53(m): 6:39pm On Nov 21, 2014
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