#prevent your data

Data Privacy Coalition

                           Data Privacy Coalition

WhatsApp’s collaborating with Open Whisper Systems taking end-to-end encryption to their billion user’s communications. Also the developer of Signal- an open source mobile messaging platform, Open Whisper Systems When offered end –to-end encryption protocol to WhatsApp, a lot of people started using it without even knowing much about it.

No doubt, this collaboration is a great step toward protecting user’s privacy, but here in this article, we will talk about why we still recommend signal over WhatsApp even though they both use end-to-end encryption.

Encryption, along with being a critical aspect of security, as it depends a lot upon how the data encryption protocol is integrated. With an open source software, any code developer can review to verify its authenticity and ensure that the application do not have any malicious code. On the contrary, software that are closed source, needs a claim of trust from its developers.

Even though WhatsApp relies on Signal’s data encryption protocol that is open source, for encrypting user’s communications, the application itself is closed source. Undoubtedly, Open Whisper Systems properly integrates the protocol into WhatsApp, but its closed source environment of the application stops us from the identification of its other aspects, which could be a possible threat to our security.

On the other hand, Signal is open source, which means anyone can verify that the communications are end-to-end encrypted, along with the facility of reviewing the overall application’s security.

Secure data storage :

Signal protocol integrating into WhatsApp is merely a communications protocol, meaning that it can only encrypt the data in transit. WhatsApp, doesn’t offer data encryption to message history, stored on our mobile phones.

Signal renders this by offering its users, the option of encrypting messages that are stored on phones with a specific passphrase which protects messages from any third-party user gaining access to the user’s device. On the other hand, WhatsApp, do not allows any user to encrypt the messages pre-stored on his phone.

Verification :

An important aspect of data security is the knack to validate, whether communications are being revived by the intended recipient only. Without such feature, it can for any third –party to intrude our network, decrypt the messages, or even, re-encrypt them to relay it back and forth. Such attack is often called man-in-the-middle attack.

In such scenario, recognition of the correspondent’s voice do not completely justifies the encryption of user’s communication. For this, we need a special kind of cryptographic verification mechanism.

Both Signal and WhatsApp offers identity verification for text messages and voice calls. For messages, relying on same mechanism: users get to compare the identity key fingerprints, after which the verified contact can be verified. However, for audio calls, the work mechanism of both the applications is quite different. With Signal voice encryption it becomes quite easy for the users, the verification of any call by reading two word to ensure that they match. On the other hand WhatsApp’s call verification, depends upon users to have done the verification previously by the comparison of fingerprints.

Business model :

Where Facebook is the owner of WhatsApp, Open Whisper Systems owns Signal. Both own a very contrasting business model.

We all are well-aware of the fact that advertising is the core part of Facebook’s business model, fueled by tons of data which users easily hand over without even thinking about its ill-effects. On the contrary, Open Whisper Systems which is a team of non-profit, software developer’s motive is to improvement data security, along with making it quite easy for its users.

While the protocol encrypts all the communications, it do not encrypts the metadata – like the contacts and more. Facebook’s willingness for implementing data encryption in WhatsApp, that restricts even the company from accessing users’ data, makes us all wonder, whether the values are being implemented or not.

Even though, Advertising gives an impression of being harmless, it is very important to keep in mind that we don’t own a complete control of our profiles, despite the fact that it is created by us.  Thus, profiles cannot be counted as 100%. Irrespective of profile’s accuracy, research proves that creating a profile may lead to several discrimination. Where it is not clear about the extent of users’ metadata being hampered by Facebook’s advertising model, it is a crucial point of concern for data privacy. Talking of Open Whisper Systems not being in any data business, Signalassures to encrypt its metadata as well.

With that said, it is important to talk about Signal’s support for Google Cloud Messaging that also means that Google — playing a massive role in data business — do not have access to the metadata shaped by Signal. Even after knowing the IP address of a device, Signal’s architecture is made in a way that hides as much data as possible.

Tags : Data Privacy , Secure messaging apps, Prevent Your Data, Boom of 2019 to secure your data ,