WhatsApp denies rumours about reading users’ messages

Recently appeared information about the fact that because of the peculiarities of the system encryption developers of the popular WhatsApp messenger can be intercepted and read user messages without their knowledge. This caused a flurry of indignation, and Tobias Bolter, a specialist in cryptography and security, University of California, Berkeley, who discovered the vulnerability and is confident that the developers of WhatsApp can send correspondence to special services. The creators of WhatsApp immediately responded to these allegations and released an official statement.

The representatives of WhatsApp says: “The Guardian published the news, claiming that the intentional decision in WhatsApp leads to the fact that people can lose millions of messages, and that this is a loophole that allows governments to force WhatsApp to decrypt the message flows. This statement is false.”

WhatsApp does not give the government “back door” into their systems and will fight any attempt to create such a loophole. Design decision referred to in the history of The Guardian prevents the interception of communications. Besides, WhatsApp offers its users a special feature to warn them about possible security threats. We have published the technical details of our encryption and has always been transparent in relation to requests from governments by publishing information about them in Facebook.

Recall that in April last year WhatsApp worked end-to-end encryption for all users. The essence of this encryption is that each device is assigned a unique encryption key. In the case of end-to-end encryption access message should be only the sender and recipient, but in the WhatsApp when the recipient is offline, creates a new encryption key, and messages are sent again. At this moment, according to some, WhatsApp could intercept the custom message.

Facebook, the company that owns WhatsApp, declined to say whether she used this feature of an encryption system for access to user messages, and if it was ever received such access upon request of public authorities.