I am not a whatsapp fanboy, but I strongly doubt that these flaws were designed, and to call them "backdoors" is hyperbole.
I also am sure that the only reason we know about this backdoor is because Bezos was blackmailed.
I am in no doubt that nation states have a cache of exploits for signal, telgram, facebook messenger and whatsapp.
I take my chances with Signal instead. Unfortunately, enticing all of my contacts to do the same has proven difficult.
An aside: is anyone else disturbed by the fact that Whatsapp now shows the Facebook logo when you first open the app? The day the Facebook Messenger/Instagram/Whatsapp merge happens is the day I'm deleting Whatsapp.
[1] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegr...
I'm disturbed because I dislike facebook, but reality hasn't changed – only become more visible. That's good. Especially for people who aren't savvy enough to already know FB owns whatsapp.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/04/facebook-branding/
My guess it was for the "I don't use Facebook, I just use Instagram" crowd.
Same for Instagram. I’m wondering if FB is trying to gain positive PR by highlighting the association. Or if it’s an upcoming regulatory requirement.
Telegram crypto was redone, and is now using standard primitives. You can verify it at high level at https://core.telegram.org/mtproto or low level if you'd like to check sourcecode in their github. BTW, telegram has reproducible builds since last year.
I'm tired of people repeating 7 years old meme without verification.
At best, the Telegram developers are well meaning but have demonstrated in previous versions of MTProto that they lack a background in cryptography or a desire to consult experts. And their public face—posts like this one—seem often to be hyperbolic attacks on competitors, which is not a great look.
I’m not a cryptographer, so I’m not going to review the current MTProto. I hope it’s awesome and bug-free. But some skepticism seems warranted.
Also, when you use the secret chat feature does that now support multiple clients or does it still establish a secret chat with a random recipient client over which neither initiator nor receiver can control?
Whatsapp and Instagram are already owned by Facebook - that is, as far as I understand, they have already merged.
The company testing his device were poorly equipped (skills wise) to perform such an analysis and basically chose the answer they wanted with weak to no real evidence.
The comment about e2e making it virtually impossible to know what was in the payload immediately put me off anything they said; they had the end of the e2e in their hands and thus everything they needed to decrypt the payload.
Someone posted a wrapper script proving all the tools needed already existed.
The article is based on that report and thus is immediately unfounded speculation.
That's what gets me, why are people thinking that they can thwart state level actors with any of this stuff? It's just incredibly naive.
If you want to cheat on your wife, you're good. (Provided your mistress is not an idiot).
But if you're trying to hide something from your government just do yourself a favor and never let that information touch the net in the first place.
Well after listening to the Darknet diaries podcast regularly, and reading about Stuxnet, I'm pretty convinced nothing is outside the realm of possibility and we doubt these things at our own peril.
The Telegram author may be biased, but learning these facts is still useful. I'm in the same boat re: Signal - want to use it more broadly but can't get others to....