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Comment by discardorama | Hacker News Reader

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discardorama·

... and Whatsapp uses FreeBSD extensively. Could this affect the end-to-end encryption that Whatsapp uses?

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It wouldn't be end-to-end encryption if WhatsApp's servers could influence the results.

Does WhatsApp run on -CURRENT? That seems unlikely.

There was a talk + slides about WhatsApp FreeBSD usage [1, 2].

At around 23:50 in the video, Rick Reed talks about slide #17, they say they are running 9.1 - 9.3, and looking at 10.1 (not in a hurry as 9 works for them).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TneLO5TdW_M

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/iXsystems/rick-reed-600-m-unsuspec...

-CURRENT is not a single version number - it refers to a development branch. If someone says CURRENT is version xx, then they don't really know what they are talking about - because while CURRENT may become a versioned release down the line, that is very different from what -CURRENT represents (which is a named tree in source control that people develop against)

All of those freebsd versions you refer to (9, 10) are part of the production release cycles and thus are not -CURRENT.

If whatsapp uses 10.1, then they are NOT using -CURRENT

Yeah, I think we are both thinking the same thing. I put the links, and version numbers, in support of tptacek's thought that they were not using -CURRENT.

It shouldn't affect end-to-end encryption, because those keys should only be generated at the endpoints (i.e. the users' devices, probably not running FreeBSD). It could affect TLS, etc, however.

> should only be generated

Theoretically, WhatsApp could generate the keys and forward them to clients, and you could still plausibly call it "End to End"

oh god, hopefully not

I doubt they're on CURRENT.

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