How to prevent them from reading your encrypted WhatsApp messages

In the last few days, a piece of news broke that disturbed the users of WhatsApp, a vulnerability had been discovered for which our messages could be read.

Although we cannot prevent this from happening, we can activate an option in the messaging application so that at least we receive a noticein the event that the encryption keys change in one of our conversations.

The aforementioned vulnerability was discovered by Tobias Boelter, from the University of California at Berkeley, a cryptographer and security expert who, thanks to An investigation has concluded that WhatsApp could have a kind of vulnerability through which Facebook would access the private content of users' conversations.

It was The Guardian who contacted the investigator to find out in depth how this would affect our privacy Although the encryption of end-to-end is secure, WhatsApp could even force an encryption through which we allow access to third parties to our conversations without the sender and receiver of the messages knowing each other find out We are not talking about hackers or anyone, but a private conversation could be revealed in the event of a government request, for example.

Prevent them from reading your encrypted messages

WhatsApp implemented end-to-end encryption for a reason. Supposedly thanks to this, our messages can only be read by the receiver and the sender, in fact, not even the application company itself could read them. Something that the discovered vulnerability has called into question.

The problem would be when the recipient is not connected and the message is waiting on the servers to be sent. Right at that point, the system could create some new keys to be able to access the content of the message, yes, it should generate one for each message but it could decipher the entire conversation. This does not mean that anyone could access our messages, but it does mean that WhatsApp could do so in the event of a request from a government, for example.

What is known, for now, is that there is one thing that we can do from the WhatsApp application itself to try to prevent this from happening to us, or at least, find out if something like this happens. We will have to go, on our phone and opening the WhatsApp app, to Settings, then to Account and finally click on Security.

Once we are in the Security part of WhatsApp, the following will be to go to «Show security notifications» With this, what we will do is that we receive notifications in the event that the passwords change in our conversation. Of course, it must be taken into account that if the recipient changes terminal for some reason, it may be that the passwords also vary.

With this, we won't make WhatsApp incapable of decrypting our messages, but we will receive warnings if the application is trying to change the encryption keys,so that if we receive the warnings on time we can stop sending messages that we don't want third parties to read.