Is WhatsApp too secure?

whatsapp
The Home Secretary will be meeting with Whatsapp and Google later this week to discuss encryption. Photo by: Marina Stroganova (Source: Flickr)

Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, has said in an interview on the Andrew Marr show that WhatsApp must not be a “place for terrorists to hide”

This has come after it was found that Kahlid Masood, who killed four people in the Westminster attacks, used WhatsApp two minutes before they took place.

WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption. This means that messages sent from one device to another cannot be intercepted in between. This means the police, security services and WhatsApp themselves cannot know what is being said.

Professor Ross Anderson of Security Engineering at The University of Cambridge told LSJ News about end-to-end encryption and what it means to investigations. Listen below.

[sc_embed_player fileurl=”https://archive.org/download/WHATSAPPINTERVIEWfinal/WHATSAPPINTERVIEWfinal.mp3″]

WhatsApp has been part of Facebook since 2014 and as part of its privacy policy it says

“We don’t store your messages once they’ve been delivered. When they are end-to-end encrypted, we and third parties can’t read them.”

 

 

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