The founders of WhatsApp and its current owner, Meta, claim that the application is equipped with complete encryption that prevents any third party from accessing the content of conversations. But a lawsuit challenged these allegations, claiming that some Meta workers have full authority to view all messages exchanged through the application.
According to the testimonies of whistleblowers, Meta employees have easy access to this authority. It is enough for the employee to send a “task” (which is a request submitted through the “Meta” internal system) to one of the engineers in the company, explaining the need to access “WhatsApp” messages to complete his work tasks.
Once this request is sent, messages become readable almost immediately, and this access includes all messages since account activation, including messages that users believe they have deleted.
In this regard, Professor Matthew Green, professor of cryptography at Johns Hopkins University, pointed out that WhatsApp encryption depends on the Signal protocol, but the code used is not open source, which makes it impossible for independent researchers to verify its implementation method.
Green explained that the closed-source nature of the WhatsApp application means that the code cannot be easily examined to ensure that encryption has been applied correctly, or even to ensure that it exists in the first place.
He added that the situation is similar in the “iMessage” and “FaceTime” applications, where Apple does not publish the end-to-end encryption (E2EE) code as open source. (Erm News)
