As evidence, the lawsuit cites unnamed “courageous whistleblowers” who allege that WhatsApp and Meta employees can request to view a user’s messages through a simple process, thus bypassing the app’s end-to-end encryption. “A worker need only send a ‘task’ (i.e., request via Meta’s internal system) to a Meta engineer with an explanation that they need access to WhatsApp messages for their job,” the lawsuit claims. “The Meta engineering team will then grant access – often without any scrutiny at all – and the worker’s workstation will then have a new window or widget available that can pull up any WhatsApp user’s messages based on the user’s User ID number, which is unique to a user but identical across all Meta products.”
“Once the Meta worker has this access, they can read users’ messages by opening the widget; no separate decryption step is required,” the 51-page complaint adds. “The WhatsApp messages appear in widgets commingled with widgets containing messages from unencrypted sources. Messages appear almost as soon as they are communicated – essentially, in real-time. Moreover, access is unlimited in temporal scope, with Meta workers able to access messages from the time users first activated their accounts, including those messages users believe they have deleted.” The lawsuit does not provide any technical details to back up the rather sensational claims.
People not understanding how security threats actually work is why everything is so broken these days.
If you do it by hand sure.
If you put the message into an app then the app is trusted to not leak the message. What is described in the article is that Whatsapp can instruct clients to send a copies of the message from the app to their server.
There is nothing stopping any messaging app doing this, having decentralized servers and 3rd party clients wouldn’t stop this but it would make it much easier to protect yourself from the attack.
Even in an “insecure” app without air-gapped systems or manual encryption, creating a backdoor to access plaintext messages is still very difficult if the app is well audited, open source, and encrypts messages with the recipient’s public key or a symmetric key before sending ciphertext to a third-party server.
If you trust the client-side implementation and the mathematics behind the symmetric and asymmetric algorithms, messages remains secure even if the centralized server is compromised. The client-side implementation can be verified by inspecting the source code if the app is open source and the device is trusted (for example, there is no ring-zero vulnerability).
The key exchange itself remains somewhat vulnerable if there is no other secure channel to verify that the correct public keys were exchanged. However, once the public keys have been correctly exchanged, the communication is secure.
Well audited is key, this attack likely works by doing something like adding Meta to the list of trusted devices, then hiding itself from the list (either because of code in the client or because it the meta device is only added for a moment), so the backdoor wouldn’t be send_all_messages_to_hq(), it would be in the code to list trusted devices, either explicitly hiding some devices or some sort of refresh timer that’s known so you can avoid being there when the UI is updated).
Or it works through the some other mechanism that still preserves E2E encryption.