WhatsApp Fixes Its Biggest Encryption Loophole
Few, if any, services have done more to bring secure messaging to more people than WhatsApp. Since 2016, the messaging platform has enabled end-to-end encryption—by default, no less—for its billions of users. No complaints there. But if you back up your WhatsApp messages to iCloud or Google Cloud, those chats no longer have that level of protection, a lesson that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and others have learned the hard way.
To be abundantly clear, this does not mean that WhatsApp’s encryption is somehow faulty, or that anyone is spying on your messages. (Unless they have a subpoena.) It’s a loophole, a function of WhatsApp relying on other people’s clouds to stash your stuff. Now, thanks to some clever cryptography, the Facebook-owned company has cooked up a way close it.
Over the next few weeks, WhatsApp will roll out an update that adds end-to-end encryption to backups, should you so choose. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature in a Facebook post this morning. It’s a complex solution to a longstanding issue, and one that sets a precedent for companies that don’t want to rely quite so extensively on the security of the world’s handful of dominant cloud providers.
