Facebook is building end-to-end encryption for all its messaging apps

guest · Jan 15, 2020

Instagram messages on the web could pose an encryption challenge
Facebook is building end-to-end encryption for all its messaging apps — and that’s a very tall order on the web
January 15, 2020
https://www.theverge.com/interface/...ram-direct-web-dms-encryption-security-stamos

But today, our messages are often scattered across a dozen or more corporate inboxes, and accessing them typically requires picking up your phone and navigating to a separate app.

All of which is to say, I was extremely excited today to see Instagram’s announcement that it had begun rolling out direct messages on the web. (The company gave me access to the feature, and it’s glorious.) Here’s Ashley Carman at The Verge:

"Starting today, a “small percentage” of the platform’s global users will be able to access their DMs from Instagram’s website, which should be useful for businesses, influencers, and anyone else who sends lots of DMs, while also helping to round out the app’s experience across devices. [...]"
[...] — but, asks former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, is it secure? After all, Facebook is in the midst of a significant shift toward private, end-to-end encrypted messaging, with plans to create a single, encrypted backend for all of its messaging apps.
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Stamos went on to highlight two core challenges in making web-based communications secure. One is securely storing cryptographic information in JavaScript, the lingua franca of the web. (This problem is being actively worked on, Stamos notes.)

As security researcher Saleem Rashid told me, the web version of WhatsApp generates a public key in the browser using JavaScript, then encodes it in a QR code that a users scans with their phone. This creates an encrypted tunnel between the web and the smartphone [...]
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Facebook is building end-to-end encryption for all its messaging apps

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