WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

https://medium.com/%400xaxgb/whatsapps-e2e-encryption-is-the-biggest-lie-in-tech-history-and-i-can-prove-it-mathematically-46ebdffeb319

by dotcoma • 1 month ago

37 50 1 month ago

medium.com

bananaflag2• 1 month ago

The content is good, but the LLM feel is jarring.

edg50004• 1 month ago

Yes, it makes me question if it just sounds good or is actually good. It's a trust thing. So I stopped reading. It could be good, or be bad. I don't know.

OutOfHere7• 1 month ago

LLMs are perfectly capable of writing well. I don't understand why people choose to use them to write poorly.

bananaflag2• 1 month ago

Maybe GPT-6 will not write poorly unless asked to.

incognito124• 1 month ago

I can't fucking stand this AI slop writing. If the author couldn't spend time writing it, I won't spend time reading it

edg50004• 1 month ago

Agree

OutOfHere7• 1 month ago

It's agreed, not agree.

OutOfHere7• 1 month ago

We need to distinguish such bad quality AI writing from good quality writing. There is absolutely no reason why AI writing has to be so bad. When it is good, you won't even know.

0xy• 1 month ago

Absolutely, it can be encrypted all they want and it's totally irrelevant given all the plaintext chats get stored straight in Google Drive (if you didn't, your conversation partners did!).

Then for some reason WhatsApp has far more critical no-click or 1-click exploits than Telegram, which has 30 global employees? Huh? There's several thousand working on WhatsApp. Telegram has more features, too. WhatsApp has less surface area, more employees, more exploits.

dotcoma2• 1 month ago

It’s a feature, not a bug.

penr0se2• 1 month ago

Maybe it's just a matter of how much effort people put into finding exploits on the two apps. If WhatsApp has many more (actual) users than Telegram, researching exploits on WhatsApp is more worth researching on WhatsApp than Telegram

A bit like how there's much more malware for Windows than there is for Linux

NateEag• 1 month ago

Several thousand employees means several thousand chances per working day to create a security breach.

I suspect that smaller teams are, on average, more likely than larger ones to write secure software.

EGreg2• 1 month ago

I’ve been saying this for years — when people derided me on HN — that we need decentralization and open-source backends, because we are relying on pinky-promises. We need attestation that we can trust.

I have been building it, piece by piece. Some pieces have been recently featured (last week) in trusted security publications:

Safecloud: https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/06/19/safecloud-browser...

Safebox and Safebots are coming too: https://safebots.ai/about

You won’t need to take anyone’s word for it. And in fact, end-to-end encryption will become unnecessary.

edg50004• 1 month ago

We just need open source clients though right?

What does attestation have to do with this? Attestation means not giving me root to my own device. No thanks.

We need something universal, like email, but better engineered.

EGreg2• 1 month ago

I mean attestation of what’s running on the server. Did you click and read?

As for the client — the app store on iOS doesn’t allow reproducible builds.

Telegram tried something close for years, which is how I know they care: https://core.telegram.org/reproducible-builds

But it doesn’t matter because the metadata is equally important and useful to get you. And anyway, end-to-end encryption can be banned, or compromised by a new app update, or secretly removed via a backdoor for some, if you pressure one guy (eg @durov in France, or his team every time they pass through an airport). Read this article — it was my response to Moxie Marlinspike (of Signal fame) years ago when he was skeptical of decentralization:

https://community.intercoin.app/t/web3-moxie-signal-telegram...

soblemprolver• 1 month ago

The article opens with a statement by Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov who claims that WhatsApp shared Messages with third parties while Telegram "never did and never will" do that.

Now, Telegram doesn't use End-to-End encryption by default at all, does it? What I mean is: The message is encrypted on the sender's device and can only be decrypted on that and the receiver's device.

Telegram uses transport layer encryption that leaves all messages exposed to the servers an their admins. Last I checked, there was a E2E feature but every room I opened would just stop working after a while and my contacts were very confused about that. Large rooms weren't possible.

I have no idea what Meta/WhatsApp may or may not be doing but this article opens with Telegram and doesn't pick that up anymore. Makes it feel like a telegram ad.

The rest of the article may be fine but it's very lengthy and goes somewhere to show that dispite using the Signal protocol, WhatsApp cloud backups can be decrypted, I think. The Telegram ad was too irritating to give the article a fair chance, to be honest.

XMPP, Matrix and Signal are there, too.

ShinyLeftPad2• 1 month ago

Now, Telegram doesn't use End-to-End encryption by default at all, does it?

Underrated fact.

Also, no one knows who exactly operates Telegram and IIRC they don't even have an office. But we know Russian authorities have intense interest in it so it's hard to imagine FSB wouldn't figure out who it is and knock on their (or their relatives still in Russia) door. We know that Russian authorities previously banned Telegram, demanded encryption keys and then a bit later unbanned it saying "Pavel Durov was prepared to cooperate in combating terrorism and extremism on the platform".

dotcoma2• 1 month ago

AFAIK, the FSB knocked on Durov’s previous company’s door, VKontakte, a Russian Facebook knock-off.

They asked for info on some of their users, were told “no” and… they told Durov that “it would be a good idea if you sold this thing to someone else”.

Which he did, for decent money but probably a lot less than it was worth. He then used that money to start Telegram, at first from Berlin and later on from Dubai, from 2017 I think.

VKontakte (VK) eventually created Max, a newish IM service that the tiger-fighting shortie at the Kremlin is pushing onto Russians, while trying to limit their use of Telegram, that is or at least was the standard in Russia.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/10/ru...

vizzah• 1 month ago

Yes, the article lost a significant amount of credibility right from the start by bringing up Durov and his well-known, ongoing rivalry with WhatsApp.

Telegram is a much worse messenger when it comes to E2E encryption and default settings.

em-bee• 1 month ago

depends, at least he didn't claim that telegram is encrypted. the problem is that whatsapp encryption gives you a false sense of security, which arguably is worse than knowing your messages are not encrypted.

wookmaster• 30 days ago

Telegram won’t even let you stop random people from spamming you if you don’t pay monthly. It isn’t a company that cares about privacy at all.

t0bia_s• 29 days ago

Not true. You have blacklist as regular user.

colesantiago• 1 month ago

If the article is from Medium, there is a 90% chance of slop.

Avoid.

nisegami• 1 month ago

This is why threat modelling is essential. What are you trying to defend against and by whom?

OutOfHere7• 1 month ago

Threat modeling is half nonsense because it becomes an excuse for negligence, often by lazy professionals who are just collecting a paycheck. Would you for example do threat modeling to protect your Bitcoin wallet passphrase or would you just secure it?

tcfhgj• 1 month ago

1.16 × 1⁰⁷⁷

reads to me like 1.16*1^077 - which makes zero sense, what is the intended meaning?

GL26• 1 month ago

it skept zeroes so, that would be 1.16*10^77 I think, and the first one is 2^256 = 1.16*10^77

mkurz• 1 month ago

Same for Telegram. A couple of years ago people (Phd kind of people) pushed me into using Telegram because "it is encrypted and secure". I checked, and was like... What? AFAIK just transmission is secure (of course, I mean like what traffic is not secure nowadays), but the message are stored plain text on servers in middle east? And the whole thing is operated by a Russian? Like wtf? And people are like "Telegram is totally secure".

penr0se2• 1 month ago

this isn’t a political fight. It’s not a he-said, she-said between tech billionaires. It’s a technical question.
In transit. Between two online devices. With no cloud backup. With no business accounts. With no Meta AI features. With no linked devices. With no law enforcement warrant for metadata.
Under every other condition — which is how most people actually use WhatsApp — the story changes dramatically.

Smells a lot like slop so I'll pass, no thanks.

hocuspocus• 1 month ago

Almost exactly the same (or worse) can be said about Google's E2EE RCS, but somehow Apple decided to publicly back the initiative. Most people would much more benefit from 1) a faster and broader rollout 2) every other feature in recent versions of the spec, rather than getting a false sense of privacy, yet we're getting a barely compliant RCS client stuck in 2019, plus performative E2EE.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 1 month ago

Feels AI generated ("linkedin-style" short sentences, blob of malformated text towards the bottom), so I'll give myself the permission to skim and take shortcuts.

The most interesting claim is the weakness of groups (the article claims the server controls who is a group member, without cryptographically secured authorization by an existing member).

The other key points are correct to my knowledge but unsurprising to anyone knowledgeable and partially apply to Signal too (backups are a weak point, you securing/disabling them properly doesn't protect you, metadata is unprotected and sensitive, participants in the conversation might upload the chat to Meta's AI, endpoints are attackable either through WhatsApp or other apps, the general trust issue - which isn't really resolved by being open source unless someone actually checks the reproducible builds AND someone reviews the code).

I thought that claim about the backup password hash was wrong, but https://www.nccgroup.com/media/fzwdxklh/_ncc_group_whatsapp_... suggests that Meta thought that 100k iterations of PBKDF2 are a reasonable choice for the key derivation, so it might actually be accurate.

AFAIK WhatsApp backups are, by default, encrypted with a key escrowed to WhatsApp (which means that an attacker using warrants now has to subpoena both the cloud provider and whatsapp - probably the best you can get while keeping backups usable for the 99% of people who can't be expected to write down a passphrase and still have it when asked).

But IMO the reality is that WhatsApp is the most secure messenger that you can expect normal people to actually use (mostly due to market share/network effect), and the only secure-ish messenger aside from Signal, so I'd be careful with the messaging towards "normies": "Signal is a much better choice, but out of the other options, Whatsapp is by far the least bad".

Otherwise, you end up with people picking something like Telegram because "it's all bad anyways" or "I've heard Telegram is secure".

jchw4• 1 month ago

This is just bad. The writing is more horrible Claude garbage. It also begins with this quote from Durov:

Despite its claims, it reads users’ messages and shares them with third parties.

Note this claim. When it goes into its first smoking gun,

WhatsApp [...] automatically backs up your entire chat history to iCloud or Google Drive
This is what Durov meant. This is why he said ~95% of messages end up in plain text on Apple/Google servers.

This is the closest the article ever comes to proving the claim at the front. Note that nothing in this claim implies that Meta can or is reading your messages, only that it is "sharing" them with a third party, so we still haven't actually successfully justified this quote.

It then rambles over just about every security controversy WhatsApp has ever had: bugs, design flaws, etc.

Okay. Then it mentions that sometimes when you're talking to a business it's actually Meta servers on the other end of the encryption, I guess. This again seems like it doesn't really prove anything.

I am not saying none of these issues are problems, but this literal dump of AI output into Medium can't even justify its primary claim. It just keeps throwing more shit at you and hopes you've forgotten what the bold claim at the front of the article actually said was, since it isn't really true.

I do not believe Matrix is a scam, but it has almost all of these problems in some form aside from the stupid Cloud Backups issue, only its a bit more complicated. It has CVEs, generates tons of metadata and several places where homeservers could attempt to attack your privacy.

Durov's platform, meanwhile, offers very little in the way of end-to-end encryption and of course generates a ton of unencrypted metadata, so I am not sure who he's fooling. It seems like they continuously brag about Telegram not being able to solve the E2EE key management problem by pointing out that other solutions are imperfect, whereas Telegram just doesn't have one. Congratulations?

causal2• 1 month ago

For anyone wondering what the actual purported security weaknesses are in this article (I used the slop machine to reduce the slop):

- Cloud backups — by default, backups to iCloud/Google Drive contain plaintext messages, and E2EE backup is opt-in. Even if you enable it, a weak password collapses the effective security, and any other person in the chat with an unencrypted backup exposes the conversation.

- Metadata — who you talk to, when, how often, IP, contact graph, etc. This is the "reading your life without reading your messages" argument, and it's the part that's genuinely well-established.

- Pen register / FBI — the claim that WhatsApp uniquely delivers near-real-time metadata (~every 15 min) to law enforcement.

- Group chat membership integrity — a server-level adversary can inject a member into a group; messages stay encrypted but get delivered to the injected party. Endpoint compromise (Pegasus / CVE-2019-3568) — encryption is irrelevant if the device is owned.

- Closed source, Meta AI, business accounts — content can leave the E2EE envelope in those flows.

Nothing really new here, and as everyone else is pointing out Telegram might be worse.

readthenotes12• 1 month ago

I thought it was also the live notifications that would display the latest message. I'm not sure those are encrypted?

causal2• 29 days ago

Yeah though to be fair that's a settings option.

rkent• 1 month ago

I'm getting very tired of all of the "this is ai slop" comments. They are now worse than the slop itself. Maybe HN needs a voting button "this is ai slop" so you can make your point without becoming slop yourself.

jchw4• 1 month ago

OK, well, I'm getting very tired of all of the terrible AI-generated articles.

I made a longer reply that discusses why I think this article is bad on top of the fact that the writing is absolutely fucking horrid, but a single person could theoretically pump out hundreds of these per day if they wanted, so having a nuanced critique for each of these is going to be pretty hard.

There's only one solution, and that is flagging and removing all AI generated articles. Fullstop.

OutOfHere7• 1 month ago

Just because some people choose to write poorly using an LLM doesn't in itself make all AI generated content bad. In can in fact be far better than an article written by a human if instructed reasonably.

ghusto2• 1 month ago

Me too. It's like virtue signalling or something. You think it's AI generated. Well done. Next?

sunshine-o• 1 month ago

By the way, I remember the chat apps interoperability in Europe was announced more than 2 years ago but so far no major competitor app have enabled it.

What are our options today to chat with WhatsApp users without using their app?

readthenotes12• 1 month ago

I bet people use WhatsApp mostly because it's free texting on many ISPs

ghusto2• 1 month ago

What about calls? I've never understood how calls could be E2EE, but WhatsApp says they are. I didn't read anything in the post claiming they're compromised too.

captn3m0• 1 month ago

You can route an encrypted video stream through a server, same as messages. Zoom supports this as well now. You can’t do fancy stuff like transcoding at the server to support an older client, but WhatsApp dropped support for non-e2e really-old clients eons ago (Symbian and the like).

WhatsApp's "End-to-End Encryption" Is the Biggest Lie in Tech History

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