Good news for people who love privacy and security! Bad news for black-hat hackers and government surveillance agencies. WhatsApp, the wildly popular messaging app, has partnered with the crypto gurus at Open WhisperSystems to implement strong end-to-end encryption on all WhatsApp text messages. . . .
WhatsApp, of course, has hundreds of millions of daily users worldwide, and was purchased by Facebook earlier this year for an eye-popping $19 billion. Open WhisperSystems creates state-of-the-art end-to-end encryption systems such as Signal, for voice, and TextSecure, for text. . . . As per the EFF’s Secure Messaging Scorecard, TextSecure is a huge upgrade from WhatsApp’s previous encryption.
And I do mean huge. Right now the TextSecure protocol has only rolled out to WhatsApp for Android–other clients, and group/media messaging, are coming soon–but already “billions of encrypted messages are being exchanged daily … we believe this already represents the largest deployment of end-to-end encrypted communication in history,” to quote OWS founder Moxie Marlinspike.
