WhatsApp is taking further efforts to make its app even safer. The Facebook owned messaging service has discreetly added end-to-end encryption to iCloud backup. The latest move comes from WhatsApp an year after it rolled out end-to-end encryption for all communication.
According to report from Forbes, iCloud backup encryption security feature was added to WhatsApp iCloud backups in late 2016, but it was only brought to light after Russia-based forensics firm Oxygen Forensics managed to bypass it.
“When a user backs up their chats through WhatsApp to iCloud, the backup files are sent encrypted,” a WhatsApp spokesperson was quoted as saying. Oxygen Forensics can only bypass the encryption when it has access to the SIM card with the same cell number that WhatsApp uses for verification to generate the encryption key. This essentially means that police or the government with access to a SIM card could potentially use it to gain access to encrypted messages stored in iCloud.
For those unaware, end-to-end encrypted messages are secured with a lock and only the recipient and sender have the special key needed to unlock and read them. For additional protection, every message you send has its own unique lock and key.