Militiamen took up whatsapp
After claims by Apple about the impossibility of legally legitimate justification for unlocking iOS without knowing the passcode, the intelligence services of the United States and Britain took up WhatsApp. The audience of this messenger is huge, the number of active users is approaching already a billion. A few years ago, WhatsApp was considered an insecure messenger who did not use encryption at all.
The situation with encryption changed in the second half of 2014, when WhatsApp authors began to cooperate with the well-known company Open Whisper Systems, which specializes in the development of a secure messenger Signal. Then WhatsApp received secure end-to-end encryption. That is, such encryption, in which the data during transmission is not stored in the decrypted form on the server. This significantly complicated the work of the special services, who could no longer receive such unhindered access to the users' correspondence.
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Dissatisfaction with encryption in messengers by the special services is quite a predetermined event. In the modern world, terrorists and criminals use them, as well as social networks, to quickly coordinate their actions. Since the number of users of these services is enormous, the secret services need a legislative act allowing such activities of access to encrypted data and allowing them to perform decryption on-line.
In addition to WhatsApp, services such as Telegram and iMessage cause dissatisfaction with the special services. The audience of the last two services is also large, they also use encryption, which makes them convenient for use by terrorists and intruders. Earlier, we wrote that law enforcement authorities have made claims against Apple, which in iOS uses user encryption based on an unlock code that is known only to the owner.
However, the safety of whatsapp still leaves much to be desired. For example, it can provide secure end-to-end encryption only for devices running Android, but not for iOS, since the freely distributed TextSecure library, available only on Android, is used to implement encryption. Well-known human rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) awarded WhatsApp the minimum two points out of seven on the security scale of working with data being sent.
The situation with encryption changed in the second half of 2014, when WhatsApp authors began to cooperate with the well-known company Open Whisper Systems, which specializes in the development of a secure messenger Signal. Then WhatsApp received secure end-to-end encryption. That is, such encryption, in which the data during transmission is not stored in the decrypted form on the server. This significantly complicated the work of the special services, who could no longer receive such unhindered access to the users' correspondence.
')
Dissatisfaction with encryption in messengers by the special services is quite a predetermined event. In the modern world, terrorists and criminals use them, as well as social networks, to quickly coordinate their actions. Since the number of users of these services is enormous, the secret services need a legislative act allowing such activities of access to encrypted data and allowing them to perform decryption on-line.
In addition to WhatsApp, services such as Telegram and iMessage cause dissatisfaction with the special services. The audience of the last two services is also large, they also use encryption, which makes them convenient for use by terrorists and intruders. Earlier, we wrote that law enforcement authorities have made claims against Apple, which in iOS uses user encryption based on an unlock code that is known only to the owner.
However, the safety of whatsapp still leaves much to be desired. For example, it can provide secure end-to-end encryption only for devices running Android, but not for iOS, since the freely distributed TextSecure library, available only on Android, is used to implement encryption. Well-known human rights organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) awarded WhatsApp the minimum two points out of seven on the security scale of working with data being sent.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/279205/
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