WhatsApp to become entirely secure

CNI Desk: Facebook-owned messaging platform WhatsApp has announced end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for chat back-ups in upcoming update amid backlash on data privacy issue over the year.

Till now, up to next update, the WhatsApp data including text, photo and video are on at risk of breaching during backup which raises privacy concern among over 2 billion users of the platform.

Currently, WhatsApp’s backup management relies on mobile device cloud partners, such as Apple and Google, to store backups of the data.

 

The E2EE refers to a communication where only the communicating users can read the messages without any access to the conversation by the service provider.

In a recent statement, the platform claimed that with the end-to-end encrypted backups, no other messaging service at WhatsApp's scale will provide this level of security for people's messages.

The company said the upcoming update will release in ‘coming weeks’ whithout mentioning any specific time.

"We are announcing this now to provide the broader technical community with our approach before it's available to our beta testers and eventually everyday users," read the statement.

If someone chooses to back up their chat history with end-to-end encryption, it will be accessible only to them, and no one will be able to unlock their backup, not even WhatsApp.

"This is really big privacy advancement, particularly at our scale of more than 2 billion users who send more than 100 billion messages a day," the company said.

 

WhatsApp new feature will be released as an optional feature and in the coming weeks, the instant messaging platform will be rolling this out to iOS and Android users.

With the introduction of end-to-end encrypted backups, WhatsApp has created an HSM (hardware security module) based backup key vault to securely store per-user encryption keys for user backups in tamper-resistant storage, thus ensuring stronger security of users’ message history.

With end-to-end encrypted backups enabled, before storing backups in the cloud, the client encrypts the chat messages and all the messaging data including text and photos and video that are being backed up using a random key on the user’s device.

The key to encrypt the backup is secured with a user-provided password. The password is unknown to WhatsApp, the user’s mobile device cloud partners, or any third party.