Remember, when Shushant Singh murder/suicide case exploded and several arrests were made, police recovered WhatsApp chat details which were so called deleted by the users. One of the tricks to recover the old WhatsApp chat, images, videos, is to recover from backup. WhatsApp data is backed up automatically at 2 AM every day. The back could be local and/or on Google Drive or iCloud. Presently, the data stored in the Google Drive and iCloud is kept in unencrypted (in plain text) form, meaning anyone with access to your device can also access to your WhatsApp backup and read it without any challenge. Additionally, if Google or Apple wants for whatsoever reason, such as responding to a Law Enforcement Agency request or compliance with any court orders, the data of WhatsApp could be recovered and readable by them too.
Facebook, the owner of WhatsApp has decided to put this to an end to it and enhance the privacy in back up. The Engineering team of Facebook has made an announcement yesterday, 10 September 2021. They have created what is called end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) back up using something called Hardware Security Module (HSM). Following two explanatory diagrams are released by the Facebook:
Without getting into too much of technicality, the claim by Facebook is that a secret key will be created on the hardware (your mobile phone) but WhatsApp will not have direct access to it. It could be a direct key or user password-based key. The WhatsApp data will be encrypted using the key and stored in the backup on Google drive or iCloud. When the backup is required to restore, user can initiate the process, and on providing the password (if activated) the data from the Google Drive or iCloud will be downloaded and decrypted (back to plain language).
The challenges are that if there are too many failed attempts then the key will be destroyed automatically and all data will be lost forever.
According to the official announcement made by the Facebook. Android and iOS user will have this WhatsApp functionality in coming weeks,
Technical savvy people can get more details here.
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