Hacker News Reader

Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice idea, but it's also baseless speculation.

You're implying that WhatsApp, Inc. gave the Egyptian government the ability to remotely retrigger this backdoor whenever they want to (for those who haven't actually read the article: this backdoor only works when WhatsApp issues a key change for a conversation, and only then in certain circumstances). In other words, you imply that Egypt said "Hey WhatsApp, please actively hack into your Egyptian users' messages and send us the results" and WhatsApp said "ok sure here ya go".

It might be true, but Zuckerberg might be a FSB informant and I might be Elvis reincarnate. These are all baseless, yet not entirely implausible claims.

View on HN

well it's only baseless speculation if you can provide at least one plausible alternative so we can say, "we don't know which is true".

niksakl's point is that the go-to "probably nothing going on" or the other "WhatsApp too popular to block so we block Signal instead" explanations are just not plausible at all.

So I don't think it's entirely baseless, and with this new information, even less so.

And Egypt making such a deal with a large company, you make it sound like you believe that's implausible, but this has in fact happened before: When Egypt hired Nokia and Siemens to develop, build and implement their DPI infrastructure. Later claiming "gosh we never expected they'd actually use this to hunt down, torture and kill dissidents". Maybe governments aren't that naive, but corporations surely will try and claim to be.

> You're implying that WhatsApp, Inc. gave the Egyptian government the ability to remotely retrigger this backdoor whenever they want to (for those who haven't actually read the article: this backdoor only works when WhatsApp issues a key change for a conversation, and only then in certain circumstances). In other words, you imply that Egypt said "Hey WhatsApp, please actively hack into your Egyptian users' messages and send us the results" and WhatsApp said "ok sure here ya go".

No, the private hackers Govs hire were able to use an exploit to snoop on Whatsapp. That's very probable.

Yeah, but that's not how the exploit would work. If you read the article, the "backdoor" is that WhatsApp could "generate" a new private key without your knowledge. Except that instead of generating a key, they'd use a well-known key. From there, they could give that key to state actors, or they could decrypt the traffic themselves and give it to state actors.

Either way, you need server side control of WhatsApp.

Which you could get by hacking WhatsApp endpoints.

Is there any evidence that this happened?

It is speculation, but it is far from baseless.

Not all speculation is inappropriate; sometimes it is the seed from which a correct conclusion ultimately grows.

Of course it is only speculation, but this is my argument: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13390564

> You're implying that WhatsApp, Inc. gave the Egyptian government the ability to remotely retrigger this backdoor

It doesn't have to be THIS particular backdoor. "Why build one when you can build two at twice the price? Only, this [second] one can be kept secret."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com