Durov hinted that WhatsApp borrowed his idea of ​​end-to-end encryption

In the most popular mobile instant messenger added strong end-to-end encryption at the level of individual users. In this case, the key never leaves the device, which means that only the user will be able to read the messages. Physically, there is no opportunity to intercept it even from a service or service provider.

In general, WhatsApp and other mobile messengers are often criticized for vulnerabilities that allow listening to data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) even compared cryptographic methods to 39 mobile instant messaging applications, and only 6 of them satisfied the experts.

Computer Security Specialist Moxi Marlinspike, together with his Open Whisper Systems team, developed an open protocol for asynchronous encryption . Asynchrony here means that end users do not need to wait for a server to respond or to have a communication partner on the network. This protocol was implemented in WhatsApp.
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So far, only the Android version has encryption. The new feature does not work for group chats and for messages with photos or videos, but Open Whisper Systems promises to deal with this situation in the future. There will be a verification by key so that you can make sure that the addressee is who he claims to be.

The information technology enthusiast of the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet, with the words “mobile messenger with strong encryption”, has only one association - this is Pavel Durov's app. In the text of his post about this, the creator of Telegram avoided a direct accusation of plagiarism, giving only a few hints.

Pavel Durov no longer uses his blog page in a social networking service that once belonged to him. The post “How to predict WhatsApp features” was written in good English and posted on the blog service medium.com, which some time ago opened free registration.

Encryption is really what Telegram is proud of. A competition has already been announced with a reward of 200 thousand dollars for breaking into the MTProto protocol, written by Pavel Durov’s brother Nikolai, but so far no one has succeeded.

Although the conditions were somewhat strange: it was suggested to decipher a fragment of the traffic like this, not to use any other vulnerabilities to gain access to the data. And the last one, by the way, even worked once .

Since the launch of the Telegram, WhatsApp raised the maximum size of videos and group chats several times. They still have not reached our level, but the progress that began exactly two weeks after Telegram was born is obvious. Following our path, WhatsApp recently added message reading status, and today, their first attempt at implementing end-to-end message encryption on Android.

medium.com/@durov/how-to-predict-whatsapp-features-4c7d84d6c524

Further, Pavel, continuing the analogy, lists the functions that he believes will soon appear in WhatsApp: the ability to share any files, the web version on web.whatsapp.com, like web.telegram.org, the distribution of data centers and the self-destruction of messages. Durov also accused Jan Kuma of trying to lure one of the developers.

The piquancy of the situation is given by the fact that Jan Kum accused Durov of copying WhatsApp back in August of last year:

Pavel Durov can only copy products like Facebook and WhatsApp. He never had original ideas and never will. WhatsApp is the most popular mobile instant messenger in the world - more than 300 million people use it, and our product works on seven different platforms.

At that time, Telegram was released only for iOS as an experimental messenger, and even Durov recognized its similarity to WhatsApp.

In February of this year, Facebook bought WhatsApp for $ 19 billion, although earlier the messenger was estimated at only 1.5 billion. Today, WhatsApp has over 600 million active users.