WhatsApp has announced all of its two billion users are now getting an option to fully encrypt their cloud chat backups. The company has also released a white paper ‘Security of End-To-End Encrypted Backups‘ detailing how the company could implement this.
“WhatsApp is the first global messaging service at this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups, and getting there was a really hard technical challenge that required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage across operating systems,” said Mark Zuckerberg.
The company confirmed that the feature is optional and users will get two ways to encrypt their cloud backups. Soon users will see an option to generate a 64-digit encryption key to lock their chat backups in the cloud storage services. This encryption key can be stored offline or in a password manager. WhatsApp has also developed a cloud-based “backup key vault” to save encryption keys.
The system has been designed to ensure that only account owners get access to chat backups.
WhatsApp already offers end-to-end encrypted chats between users but chat backups to cloud storage services were in an unencrypted format. Most law enforcement agencies use chat backups on Google and Apple servers to access WhatsApp chat of suspects.
Apple already encrypts iMessages backups but the company still holds the keys to encrypt backups. So, Apple can help law enforcement agencies in recovering messages in plain text. WhatsApp is going a step ahead.
