Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Whatsapp Security System
Whatsapp Security System
Our world “Interconnected”, our lives “Interconnected” and our data is “Vulnerable”. Yes, it is bitter but a real truth that we all are exposed to security flaws that are present in our systems. All of us (including me) use various social networking sites, instant messaging software, they are now like a part of our day-to-day life our day starts by a good morning status and ends with a good night one. But, have you ever thought that “Is this Safe?” Oh!! What? All my friends use it has crossed 100 million downloads on play store it must be safe. That’s a wrong way of thinking nothing is perfect and never should be but there are some people who take false profit of these mistakes (I say loop holes). Well, these days’ companies pay a good amount of money to make their security better, but as a user we should at least know that how the product we are using is securing us and our privacy.
Today, I am going to talk about a messenger service called Whatsapp. I has a billion downloads on play-store and very popular among people of all ages. So, how is the whatsapp’s privacy policy and its protection against hackers and loop holes.
History of Whatsapp
My objective is to show you How Whatsapp security Works? So, I will not go into deep about history rather tell you in context. Initially Whatsapp Inc was founded in 2009 by former Yahoo employees named Brian Acton and Jan Koum. After these two left yahoo in 2009 they also applied for Facebook but were not selected they were on their savings from yahoo. Suddenly, koum go through a app in a iPhone called app store and that made him think that this app industry is going to make a big impact on the global market in few years. So, with help of his friend they designed an instant messaging app called whatsapp which sounds like what’s up the app was initially supported in iOS platform and has to do a lot struggle to be a Stable version it kept crashing again and again but finally it was able to be a stable version by late 2009. After two months from this blackberry version of whatsapp was released soon whatsapp was in the list of top 20 app on app store.
In august 2010 it’s android app was released on play-store and a flood of users came into whastapp by 2011 it was a company with a staff members of 50 and net worth of $ 1.5 billion. India has the highest number of whatsapp users about 10% of total users that is around 65 million active users.
On February 19, 2014 whatsapp was accuried by Facebook for US $ 19 billion(Once rejected to give a job) a very huge amount was paid because of it’s vast number of users worldwide and also decrement in the usage of Facebook due to instant messaging services.
In 2015 whatsapp touched a milestone of 800 million active users worldwide and that was huge. It also launched a web client to use whatsapp from PC or mac through scanning your phone on its website called Whatsapp Web.
Security in Whatsapp
In May 2011, a security hole was reported which left WhatsApp user accounts open for session hijacking and packet analysis.WhatsApp communications were not encrypted, and data was sent and received in plaintext, meaning messages could easily be read if packet traces were available.
In September 2011, WhatsApp released a new version of the Messenger application for iPhones, closing critical security holes that allowed forged messages to be sent and messages from any WhatsApp user to be read.
On January 6, 2012, an unknown hacker published a website that made it possible to change the status of an arbitrary WhatsApp user, as long as the phone number was known. To make it work, it only required a restart of the app. According to the hacker, it is only one of the many security problems in WhatsApp. On January 9, WhatsApp reported that it had resolved the problem, although the only measure actually taken was to block the websites IP address. As a reaction, a Windows tool was made available for download providing the same functionality. This problem has since been resolved in the form of an IP address check on currently logged-in sessions.
Many times whatsapp was been removed from the app store and Windows store due problems in it and was added back after solving them by the company.
In November 2014, Open Whisper Systems signed a deal with Whatsapp to provide end-to-end encryption to the data of users and secure them from hacking or stealing. But according to a research carried out by an independent body that only android devices where protected by encryption but iOS devices where still vulnerable to hackers. But the company claimed that all platforms are more secure and it gives a regular update in their encryption.
Currently the latest version of Whatsapp has .crypt8 encryption algorithm.
Available link for download
