WhatsApp: Backdoor or design decision? What companies say

After our publication yesterday "Backdoor in WhatsAppTobias Boelter, a cryptographer and security researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, Guardian that:

"If WhatsApp is asked by a government agency to disclose its messages, it can grant access by changing the keys."

The official responses were followed by the companies directly concerned: WhatsApp and Facebook, which has bought the application.

Let's see what the companies said:

Facebook responded to the issue, commenting on the fact that the defect essentially prevents messages from being lost during transport. Here is the complete statement:

More than one billion people use WhatsApp today because they are simple, fast, reliable and safe. At WhatsApp, we always believe that people's conversations must be safe and private. Last year, we gave all our users a better level of security by making every message, photo, video, files use end-to-end encryption by default.
In the Signal protocol of the WhatsApp application, we have a setting "Show Security Notifications" (as an option in Settings> Account> Security) that notifies you when the security code of a contact has changed. We know that the most common reasons this happens is because someone has changed phone or reinstalled WhatsApp. This is because in many parts of the world, people often change devices and SIM cards. In these cases, we want to make sure that the messages are delivered and not lost during the transfer.

WhatsApp also responded by issuing its own statement, calling the backdoor a "design decision."

The Guardian published a story this morning claiming that a deliberate decision in WhatsApp design that prevents millions of messages from being lost is a backdoor that allows governments to force WhatsApp to decipher streams. It is a lie.
Η WhatsApp has not given backdoor governments to its systems and is fighting against any government request to create a backdoor. The Guardian's decision-making decision prevents millions of messages from being lost and WhatsApp offers alerts that warn of potential security risks. OR WhatsApp has published a WhitePaper for encryption planning and there is transparency in the requests it asks the government to receive, publication of data on requests submitted by the government after they are published on Facebook Government Requests Report.