The list of names at the end of Zeynep's article is pretty much a who's who of people you don't want to be publicly called wrong by when reporting on security.
A realist would, however, see this as a news outlet unable to own their mistake and instead doubling down as you said, in a failed attempt to save face. A journalist wrote this story seemingly by the seat of her pants, and her employer is on a noble if misguided campaign to defend her article.
I'm taking the realist path on this one; I don't think there's any grand conspiracy behind their baffling decision to stand behind obviously shoddy reporting. The fact that so many top security researchers -- who certainly aren't going to be influenced by any particular government or corporate interest -- are calling for a retraction is all the assurance I need that the story is baseless and the Guardian is inexplicably enjoying the taste of shoe leather.
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This wasn't negligent disinformation (post-revision of the usage of 'backdoor') on the part of the Guardian. The reaction to the information presented on the part of the public - to switch to SMS in significant numbers - was irrational.
That said, there is a productive issue raised by the Guardian that has been smoked out into the open, namely the revelation of two contradictory assumptions underlying the decision, as discussed by Moxie in the previous HN thread, to defend against state level snooping.
The rationale goes a bit like this: 1 - People change keys in the regular course of using Whatsapp. It therefore needs to accept that without impeding usability.
2 - Most users do not care about security enough to prefer one service to another for the Whatsapp market segment - Those users use Signal or other offerings.
3 - Whatsapp's lack of 'post consent' resending is intentional, and designed to prevent the server from knowing who is monitoring the status of their keys.
4 - As such, Whatsapp effectively defends against dragnet surveillance! As security minded individuals will note inappropriate key changes once a MITM attack begins, confer, and determine they have been compromised at scale.
The key flaw here is that 2 and 3 mean that for targeted surveillance, powerful attackers are unlikely to be uncovered while exfiltrating specific communications, and likely don't see very much reputational or legal risk to potentially triggering a key change event.
So people are vulnerable to feasible, targeted message exfiltration, contrary to what they may have believed when E2E was rolled out. That's newsworthy.
The fact that the security community is striking back makes me feel like they are circling the wagons now that the Guardian has caught them with their pants down - They should have been the ones raising these issues and providing the appropriate framing to protect the public.
I don't believe the piece was not 'newsworthy', though, and I believe the security industry's response should have been one of collaboration rather than admonition - it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to see an industry with a clear communication problem striking at their best potential ally. The Guardian are not the 'bad guys' for trying to inform us of a vulnerability.
This is my ultimate takeaway as well; their intent was good, it was their implementation that fell short. I'm just really bothered that they are unwilling to own their mistake and retract the article, or at the very least allow a counter-editorial to be written and published by them.
They need to retract.
If your list of sources is full of anonymous rumors and things that can't be fact checked, or other stories with poor sourcing, I ignore the entire article and its conclusions. It's an interesting exercise for how you consume news (and especially "news") and I recommend it to everyone.
That's part of what makes reading purely technical discussions so much more enjoyable. We're not talking about random internet rumors, we talk about code and anyone with a compiler, debugger, etc. can verify things directly. There's much less room for BS, because someone can call you on it and prove you wrong in ways that everyone can verify independently.
What makes you so sure? The Guardian is fundamentally devoted to reporting the truth even - especially - when it's hostile to the government - the organisation is structured deliberately to ensure its independence. Can the quoted experts say the same about their payroll?
(see my response here for the explanation of the scare quotes on security: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13445337)
But putting "VACCINES CAN KILL" as a headline in a mass-circulation paper would be just as wrong, and for the same reasons.
So you admit it's true, but it's wrong to write it as a headline?
It's interesting to see people put their head in the sand regarding the Signal/Whatsapp security flaws.
The "appeal to authority" fallacy occurs when someone is cited outside their area of expertise or is not an expert.
Qualified authorities in one century may be shown to be completely wrong. For example bloodletting, phlogiston, or even the age of the earth before radioactivity was discovered. Feynman talks about this... how the number stays close to the others until finally they jump to the right one.
"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck
So while, yes, he is accurate that our knowledge of the world around us and of Science changes over time, that has nothing to do with the fallacies we're discussing.
"use whatsapp" is the correct recommendation for everyone who is not ready to use opsec recommendations from grugq, same as "TLS everywhere" is a very good recommendation regardless of all the issues we know about TLS.
Let's make pervasive passive collection impossible. Then we can work on stuff like endpoint security for everyone.
Just so you know, tptacek signed this letter. I did as well.
Calling it a backdoor was outright dishonest. I've written backdoors. I even won a cryptography backdoor contest at DEFCON with one of my designs.
https://underhandedcrypto.com/2015/08/08/crypto-privacy-vill...
https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/01/on-design-and-implementat...
If it's to be said that there is a vulnerability, then it is simply, "If there are any messages that haven't been delivered yet, and the recipient changes keys, the client will re-encrypt to the new public key before alerting."
Okay, a lot of security experts wouldn't make that trade-off, especially if they were trying to compete with Signal. But WhatsApp isn't a Signal competitor. The alternative means of contacting someone you'd normally use WhatsApp for is SMS, because that's what people are using today.
Most WhatsApp users aren't interested in encryption. It just works for them. They may still need it, but they don't care about it.
Even if you could exploit this, you get:
- Any undelivered messages (if any)
- No past messages
- No stealth either; the user does get alerted
WhatsApp is not a secure communications platform. Claiming otherwise is disingenuous.
IF the user opts in, they have the option of being notified. Most users do not know this option exists or care to enable it, so I'm not sure the above is strictly true.
I think the over-reaction to the stance of the security community is that it gives the vibe that the flaw is minimized. For the layman, every security flaw, every vulnerability is a totally obscure, incomprehensible jargon-filled techno mumbo-jumbo. Now we have the case that sometimes the experts go wild over the dangers of a flaw, sometimes they say "Ah, better than nothing". It gives the impression that WhatsApp is been let off the hook.
I think the argument would have been better framed by stating simply that WhatsApp's decision is a security flaw, that it should be fixed from a security POV, but it's still better than most alternatives and leave it at that.
That whole dance about it being an acceptable compromise would have been better off omitted. The letter commits the same error as the Guardian: in trying to be too comprehensive and precise, it muddies its point.
They're not acceptable in general.
They're acceptable within the context of the problem they are trying to solve, which isn't "make crypto nerds happy". Their users, by and large, know absolutely nothing about cryptography. Any attempt to add key verification will either:
- Spook them
- Intimidate them
- Confuse them
- Make them move to an insecure platform that their contacts
already use; i.e. SMS
- All of the aboveIf something is actually true, then why is it preferable not to say it publicly (including in a headline)? As long as the qualifying statements are made alongside it (eg probabilities)?
Why should governments have so much classified information and secrets? What if they just operated entirely transparently? (Except for short term tactics for raids and investigations of suspected criminals and terrorists.)
Heavily de-contextualised true information can be just as misleading as actual lies. Hence the vaccine example.
The probability can be conditioned on some relevant assumption to make the story sensationalized. But as long as the probability and assumption is clearly spelled out, I don't see what other context should be required for PUBLIC disclosure. Maybe also the total incidence number.
For example: Jihadist terrorists can kill you! With a 0.001% probability for every hour you spend in a large crowd. It has happened in two crowds so far.
Or: 97% of climate scientists agree the rise in greenhouse gases is mostly attributable to human activities. That is 97% of 35 PEOPLE in the world.
(the climate scientist number is probably closer to 35,000; and when talking of surveys and samples, reporting the sample size causes everyone not professionally trained in statistics - that is, almost everyone - to underestimate the "power" of the survey.)
Don't they end up being lies of omission at that point?
People come away thinking "vaccines are bad". In this case, the Guardian put the tech equivalent of "vaccines can kill you" in a headline.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/01/whatsapp_secu...