I dislike this "ZuccNet" as the real goal should be abandoning facebook ecosystem but I still think that anything for naive people is better than nothing, so thumbs up.
Facebook does not have the key to decrypt messages sent with Secret Conversations. It is generated on-device. You can confirm that using simple reverse engineering tools on, say, the Android APK.
Yes, Facebook could subvert the binary by pushing an update. That is the risk you are accepting.
Let me explain how this works in PR world. You publish (with all the bells and whistles) that you have end to end encryption and explain protocol that uses asymmetric cryptography (just for the sake of simplicity I will simplify - you have public and private key, you send public key to all chatters with you, they will encrypt randomly generated symmetric key with it (asymmetric crypto is slow, you don't want to use it directly) and send it back (where you decrypt it) and vice versa. Then you use symmetric key that you have safely exchanged for use in block cypher, lets say Rijndael 265635238 bits (as big numbers mean more safety(tm) /s).
You publish white papers of protocol, get all the cryptographers on your side. Fanboys are screaming, public is applauding, girls wants to sleep with you and president is thankful. What you don't tell is that you also encrypt symmetric key with YOUR public key that is embedded into application and send it along as a "status_check" field.
And everyone is happy forever after. /s
> Your speculation is not interesting to me.
This works in both directions. But bottom line, whitepaper is not the application (and even if it would be, have fun reading http://www.underhanded-c.org/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG and who has more motive as the corporation that profits from spying on everyone and everything). It is just as the name says. Whitepaper.
"Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes"
or maybe you will like this one more:
"Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets"
And you dont trust someone as Facebook or Google any more. They have lost trust in ship containers not buckets.
That's exactly the kind of risk you should never accept when it comes to Facebook.
This is a baseless assertion.
If you want to go beyond generic concerns, there are plenty of academic papers that have looked at Facebook Secret Conversations, found actual issues, and helped get them fixed: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00145-020-09360-1 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-63697-9_... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96884-1_...
This is Facebook, for pete's sake. The same company that conducted psychological experiments with zero clinical/ethical oversight by manipulating its users' feeds to see if it could cause depression/anxiety (or the opposite).
Facebook is evil and you should not trust them even a little bit.
Do they offer this service in Australia? Yes. Then they have the keys.
[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/go...
So they either have the keys or a way to force the client to decrypt.