WhatsApp backdoor allows snooping on encrypted messages
No matter what IM service you use: As long as they manage the public keys for their users, they will be vulnerable to exactly this problem. This isn't just WhatsApp. This applies to iMessage and Signal too.<p>In all cases, we rely on the word of the service provider that they don't sneak additional public keys to encrypt for into the clients and in all cases we hear that doing so would cause a message dialog to appear, but we have zero control over that as this is just an additional software functionality (yes. Signal is Open Source, but do you know whether the software you got from the App Store is the software that's on Github?)<p>Also imagine the confusion and warning-blindness it would cause if every time one of my friends gets a new device I'd get huge warnings telling me that public keys have changed.<p>This is a hard problem to solve in a user-friendly way and none of the current IM providers really solve it. Maybe Threema does it best with their multiple levels of authenticity.<p>As such I think it's unfair to just complain about WhatsApp here.