Comment on Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption
hersh@literature.cafe 10 hours agoFor most: yes, there is a risk that the vendor has included a backdoor. There is also the risk that they are straight-up lying about how their service operates.
For Signal in particular: You can verify that their claims are true because you can audit the source code.
The Signal client is open-source, so any interested parties can verify that it is A) not sending the user’s private keys to any server, and B) not transmitting any messages that are not encrypted with those keys.
Even if you choose to obtain Signal from the Google Play Store (which comes with its own set of problems), you can verify its integrity because Signal uses reproducible builds. That means it is possible for you to download the public source code, compile it yourself, and verify that the published binary is identical. See: github.com/signalapp/…/reproducible-builds
You might not have the skills or patience to do that yourself, but Signal has undergone professional audits if anyone ever discovers a backdoor, it will be major news.
You are more likely to be compromised at the OS level (e.g. screen recorders, key loggers, Microsoft Recall, etc.) than from Signal itself.
wischi@programming.dev 10 hours ago
Signal could still (at least for a short period of time) read everything. Whisper System just has to push a Signal Update that no longer encrypts. It would probably be noticed pretty soon. And no not because of the source code. The source code is what they claim to ise to build the applications but they could easily apply patches before they build. You’d have to reverse engineer the compiled applications ro see if there is code that’s probably not in the source.
This kind of problem is typically way smaller in projects that actively encourage building the clients from source yourself - which Whister System/Signal does not.
SlippiHUD@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Theres so many ways to check for that that don’t require decompiling the app.
You can straight compare the downloaded binary with a locally compiled binary to see if they match.
You can check the hash of app. Changing some lines of code and getting the same hash is so unlikely to be effectively impossible.
If for some reason Signal decided to do what you claim, it’d destroy thier credibility, be caught almost immediately, and only work once before the whole project gets forked, and would be true of any alternative.