“If a data center, or even a machine or network switch in a data center, theoretically went down, we don’t want that to impact someone’s ability to get their end-to-end encrypted backup and decrypt their chat history.”Īnd while generally it’s preferable to enable privacy and security features by default, in this case opt-in makes sense. “Redundancy is important,” says WhatsApp software engineering manager Slavik Krassovsky. And the service replicates your key in HSM-based Backup Key Vaults across five geographically disparate data centers, to ensure you can still access your chats even if one of them has an outage. Too many wrong password attempts, and the key will become “permanently inaccessible,” a measure designed to prevent so-called brute force attacks. WhatsApp has built in a few additional protections, as well. It’s a complex solution to a longstanding issue, and one that sets a precedent for companies that don’t want to rely quite so extensively on the security of the world’s handful of dominant cloud providers. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the feature in a Facebook post this morning. Over the next few weeks, WhatsApp will roll out an update that adds end-to-end encryption to backups, should you so choose. Now, thanks to some clever cryptography, the Facebook-owned company has cooked up a way close it. (Unless they have a subpoena.) It’s a loophole, a function of WhatsApp relying on other people’s clouds to stash your stuff.

To be abundantly clear, this does not mean that WhatsApp’s encryption is somehow faulty, or that anyone is spying on your messages. But if you back up your WhatsApp messages to iCloud or Google Cloud, those chats no longer have that level of protection, a lesson that former Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort and others have learned the hard way. Since 2016, the messaging platform has enabled end-to-end encryption-by default, no less-for its billions of users. Few, if any, services have done more to bring secure messaging to more people than WhatsApp.

Is whatsapp safe