posted in Technology

German police read WhatsApp messages without cracking encryption

cross-posted from : lemmy.zip/post/71321898

Netzpoltik details that police are able to gain access in this way either through physical access to someone’s phone or by intercepting verification codes via a state-sanctioned phishing attack or intercepting SMS messages via telephone surveillance

cybernews.com/privacy/police-telegram-whatsapp-signal-surveillance-linked-devices/

Replying to @⁨schizoidman@lemmy.zip⁩

There have been too many of these types of events related to signal. And it has so many red flags. You are required to have a phone number which is essentially ur real identity. They used to federate with 3rd party servers but they killed that and all but wiped it from the internet. They try to shut down 3rd party clients. They don’t provide reproducible builds so we can’t trust the source. They received their initial funding from In-Q-Tel the CIA venture capital firm.

Every time someone tries to raise any of these issues they are immediately shut down and told that its all for a good reason and that we should trust it.

At minimum they have a full social graph of real identities with time-stamped message events. Sealed sender doesn’t negate this as signal knows ur ip address when u give them a message. They also know the destination of that message as that isn’t sealed. This is sufficient information to link sender and recipient and timestamp. That’s assuming the unreproducible builds don’t have backdoors.

It’s all got a slightly fishy smell to it.

Tldr: If u want actual secure messaging u should consider SimpleX

Replying to @⁨muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com⁩

There are all of these stories about signal because it is notable when someone gets around it

That there’s anything approaching secure communication on a cell-phone dominated Internet whose.operating systems are either “snobbish walled garden” or “ad agency living in the corpse of a search engine” is astonishing. In the same way that a gun safety that keeps a toddler from shooting themselves with an otherwise loaded gun is astonishing.

Replying to @⁨muntedcrocodile@hilariouschaos.com⁩

Signal supports Tor.

They have features like Sealed Sender, which is at least on par with the multiple server behavior of Simplex as it behaves the same (message passing multiple servers, carrying no sender origin data in plaintext)

Simplex knows the same thing. The pairwise identifiers is a sham - all your different identifiers point to the same Android/iOS notification server API key so they know the recipient is the same person, they can tell which exact phone receives a notification when somebody sends you a message (unless the devs use anonymized fetch on a polling schedule, which they don’t)

And because they don’t hide those sender stamps, Simplex leak more info than Signal with Sealed sender

Edited ⁨⁨Sep⁩ ⁨12⁩, ⁨2026⁩, ⁨10:17⁩⁩en