WhatsApp Brings End-To-End Encryption To Its Android App WhatsApp, a massively popular messaging app, recently added end-to-end encryption for some mobile clients, a move that brings a high level of security to millions of users. he change is the result of a partnership with Open Whisper Systems, the secure text and mobile OS company started by security researcher Moxie Marlinspike. Twitter acquired Open Whisper Systems in 2011 and Marlinspike stayed on there for two years before leaving. He has been working on encryption systems for many years and recently partnered with WhatsApp to help the company implement end-to-end encryption for users. Right now, the encryption feature is included in the WhatsApp client for Android and only works for one-to-one messages, not group messages. “The most recent WhatsApp Android client release includes support for the TextSecure encryption protocol, and billions of encrypted messages are being exchanged daily. The WhatsApp Android client does not yet support encrypted messaging for group chat or media messages, but we’ll be rolling out support for those next, in addition to support for more client platforms. We’ll also be surfacing options for key verification in clients as the protocol integrations are completed,” Open Whisper Systems said in a blog post(https://whispersystems.org/blog/whatsapp/). What is ‘End-to-End’ encryption? Today, we have been hearing a lot about various snooping cases by Governments across the globe over these messaging apps. Most companies want to avoid being controlled by these government norms but then they don’t have the required security protocols in place to overcome this. What ‘End-to-end’ encryption simply means is WhatsApp won’t be able to decrypt the messages itself even if the law prosecution compels Facebook. WhatsApp will set up the key exchange between users, but only among the users involved in the conversation will access to it. Why Open Whisper Systems? Open Whisper is the same startup that Twitter had acquired way back in 2011 that is looking after the end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp. Post acquisition, the TextSecure software code base was made available to public as free and open source. Their code base has been publicly inspected several times and has endured all such attacks successfully, getting the app a trust across various security groups. Open Whisper Systems has been fairly popular for their various apps including the likes of Redphone, TextSecure and Signal. Text Secure’s unique forward secrecy feature pegged WhatsApp to implement their system to make itself secure. Forward secrecy assures that the messages are encrypted even if some hacker tries to break into the system at any given time too. Open Whisper has said the team will continue improving its in-house apps, but the company also expects to take on more integrations like this one in the future. The team has enormous praises for WhatsApp for its dedication towards devoting considerable time and effort to this project. They have great admiration for the WhatsApp team, they have mentioned in their blog post - Brian Acton and the WhatsApp engineering team have been amazing to work with. Their devotion to the project as well as their thoroughness in getting this done are inspiring in a world where so many other companies are focused on surveillance instead of privacy. Even though this update is in its infant steps, but the result is unattackable encryption for 500 millions+ users that have Whatsapp installed — the largest-ever implementation of this standard of encryption in a messaging apps in history globally. Would be interesting to see what Narendra Modi has to say about this move? His council of ministers are trying to add filters to the web and trying to get control over messaging apps in India. See more at: https://threatpost/whatsapp-adds-encryption-by-default-to-android-app/109442 startupadda.in/whatsapp-embraces-open-source-a-lot-more-secure-with-this-new-update/
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 04:21:30 +0000