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WhatsApp has announced that it will add a new layer of protection from prying eyes by allowing users of the popular Facebook-owned messaging service to store end-to-end encrypted backup copies of their messages in the cloud.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the new feature on Friday. A whitepaper published by WhatsApp, which the social networking company bought for billions of dollars in 2014, said it will be available to users later in 2021.
WhatsApp already uses end-to-end encryption to secure messages transmitted by its users, effectively making this data undecryptable to anyone but the intended recipient and sender, including the company itself.
Currently, WhatsApp users can store copies of their data in third-party online storage lockers, but these messages and media are not protected by end-to-end encryption. However, this will soon change.
“We’re adding another layer of privacy and security to WhatsApp: an end-to-end encryption option for backups that people choose to store in Google Drive or iCloud,” Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page.
“WhatsApp is the first global messaging service of this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups, and achieving this service was a really tough technical challenge that required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage in operating systems,” he said. Added Zuckerberg.
End-to-end encryption protects data from unauthorized third parties by making it difficult or impossible to decrypt without knowing a digital key held by the sender or receiver.
The whitepaper published by WhatsApp explained that users will soon be able to create backup copies of their data, which is encrypted using a locally generated key and then uploaded to the cloud.
“The encryption key for the backup is secured with a user-supplied password. The password is unknown to WhatsApp, the user’s mobile device cloud partners, or any third party,” reads part of the white paper.
Another quote says, “Because the backups are encrypted by Google or Apple with an unknown key, the cloud provider cannot read them.”
The new feature is likely to annoy officials who previously relied on cloud providers to issue subpoenas to obtain unencrypted copies of WhatsApp communications that could not possibly be obtained otherwise.
In one notable example, a leading figure in the federal investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 US presidential election was accused of falsifying witnesses after seeing the government’s WhatsApp messages.
Paul Manafort, one time head of former President Donald Trump’s successful 2016 campaign, was under house arrest in 2018 when the government was able to collect WhatsApp data.
In a court case in February, the US Department of Justice cited several WhatsApp messages that showed Manafort had recently used the service to communicate with two partners identified as related to foreign lobbying.
While Manafort’s messages were end-to-end encrypted, he kept an unencrypted backup copy of his data in his iCloud account, an account the Department of Justice had legal access to by court order.
As the Justice Department has previously announced, both individuals contacted by Manafort via WhatsApp and therefore able to decipher their end-to-end encrypted communication gave their messages to the government.
WhatsApp currently has more than 2 billion users in over 180 countries. According to the company, all messages, calls, video chats and media sent on WhatsApp have been end-to-end encrypted since 2016.
“We focus primarily on protecting people’s messages,” said Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp. “Of course, whenever technologists improve security, some will argue that it’s bad to offer more privacy if it makes it harder for governments to access that information,” he added.
In a series of posts from his verified account on the social media service Twitter, Mr. Cathcart stated WhatsApp’s stance on security and agreed with some of the conflicting views expressed by others.
“We believe that free societies need the best security to protect people. “Billions of people now have sensitive digital information such as their private messages, and there is an increasing risk of this information being stolen by hackers, criminals and even hostile states.”
“The main feedback we’ve heard so far is that they want WhatsApp and others to collect less data and offer more privacy,” he continued. “Still, we are far from consensus on this issue. Some governments continue to recommend using their powers to require companies to offer weaker security. We think this is backwards: We should demand more security, not less, from companies for people’s sensitive information.”
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