WhatsApp really is encrypting your messages now. But why?

“This is the real deal,” TwoSense founder Dawud Gordon wrote, in response to the news that the messaging service WhatsApp had fully encrypted its messages. “The implementation is done using PKI, meaning only the sender and intended recipients have access to message content.”
Wired reported this week that the scale of WhatsApp encryption dwarfs even the FBI vs. Apple case.
“With end-to-end encryption in place, not even WhatsApp’s employees can read the data that’s sent across its network,” according to Wired. “In other words, WhatsApp has no way of complying with a court order demanding access to the content of any message, phone call, photo, or video traveling through its service.”
That TwoSense’s Gordon says their encryption is solid is not for nothing. In November, he wrote a guest post for Technical.ly Brooklyn titled WhatsApp is not really encrypting your messages. With a Ph.D. in computer science and an app that deals with data security, the Williamsburg-based Gordon knows whereof he speaks.
“It would appear that the only weakness is in the backup feature, where backups can be decrypted and accessed, but only with physical access to the device,” he said.
One part of this that really doesn’t make sense to either Gordon (or Technical.ly Brooklyn) is why Facebook paid nearly $19 billion for a service it now can’t pull any information from.
“I assumed that the reason they were so valuable to Facebook was that there was a channel of communication happening outside of Facebook and the only reason Facebook would care about that is for advertising revenue,” Gordon said. “Why would it be worth $19 billion to Facebook if they were going to lose the value if all that content? If that’s not why [WhatsApp] was that valuable then why are they that valuable?”