this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
817 points (99.6% liked)
Technology
79355 readers
4180 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If I am not adding my own private key to the app, like in Tox, I don't trust their encryption.
What's to stop an evil company uploading the keys as soon as you enter them in the App? It certainly wouldn't stop Meta.
What's stopping the app from keeping your private key and still not encrypting anything?
I'm not trying to be difficult here, I just don't see how anything outside of an application whose source you can check yourself can be trusted.
All applications hosted by other people require you to react positively to "just trust me bro".
Or, if the app has the private key for decryption for the user to be able to see the messages, what's stopping the app from copying that decrypted text somewhere else?
The thread model isn't usually key management, it's more about the insecure treatment of the decrypted message after decryption.
Tox also isn't that great security wise. It's hard to beat Signal when it comes to security messengers. And Signal is open source so, if it did anything weird with private keys, everyone would know
Well, no. At least not by default as you are running a compiled version of it. Someone could inject code you don't know anything about before compilation that for example leaked your keys.
One way to be more confident no one has, would be to have predictable builds that you can recreate and then compare the file fingerprints. But I do not think that is possible, at least on android, as google holds they signature keys to apps.
Signal is also on F-Droid, so it should be verifiable
Signal has reproducible builds and here's the instruction how to check it on Android https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/blob/main/reproducible-builds/README.md
Well, Whatsapp uses signal. Bad timing
It only uses some of signal's code. Not necessarily the OOTB key storage and security.
How?
Read more than just the title ffs
I did and nowhere is Signal mentioned in the article.
You state Whatsapp uses Signal. So, again: how?
The article does not describe what encryption it uses, it described how they're abusing it. Whatsapp using Signal protocol is public knowledge.
What I'm trying to say is that a company using signal for it's messaging app does not imply your data is safe from that company or governments.
You recommending an app purely because of Signal protocol under an article about how an app abuses signal protocol is pretty fucking ironic (aka. bad timing)
Unless proof is given, assume troll
Read the article? An app using signal does not imply that your data is still encrypted from corporations or government. Your neighbour joe is not very likely to break already established SSL, so using signal feels like someone is trying to sell me a bridge. Sense of false security. In fact, that was probably their goal all along.
WhatsApp is using Signals protocol for communication: https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/
I don't fully understand what it entails, but from what I understand is that yes, WhatsApp is using the same encryption and message flow that signal uses, but you're still using Meta's app, and they can just read the plaintext message from there.
Or they can make a copy of the encryption keys on creation. Using the code is very different than using the code unedited, or using all the code.
To my knowledge, under Signal, the encription keys are locally generated and stored, and the traffic flows between end points as a closed packet.
This does not seem to be the case here, as the keys are generated and stored outside your equipment and, thus, are viable to be used by a third party to access packets.
But I admit I speak heavily burdened by technical ignorance.
My understanding is they're sending a request to your device that then decrypts and uploads messages, not storing the keys outside your device.
that’s incorrect. with whatsapp, your keys are stored on meta servers (the same as things like imessage). they can simply decrypt them whenever they like, just like being signed in as you. it’s completely invisible to your client
Ewwwwwwww
Man, you just brought back memories. I forgot qtox was even a thing. I think I still have my profile saved in my dev folder somewhere for my account