[stiray]

If you are trusting facebook in any matter, you are misunderstanding something. Whatever they say, they have the keys to decrypt it. It is like trusting the thief to guard your house.

I dislike this "ZuccNet" as the real goal should be abandoning facebook ecosystem but I still think that anything for naive people is better than nothing, so thumbs up.

[sweis]

Your assertion is false. Please read the whitepaper.

Facebook does not have the key to decrypt messages sent with Secret Conversations. It is generated on-device. You can confirm that using simple reverse engineering tools on, say, the Android APK.

Yes, Facebook could subvert the binary by pushing an update. That is the risk you are accepting.

[stiray]

This is whitepaper, it is not implementation of closed source application.

Let me explain how this works in PR world. You publish (with all the bells and whistles) that you have end to end encryption and explain protocol that uses asymmetric cryptography (just for the sake of simplicity I will simplify - you have public and private key, you send public key to all chatters with you, they will encrypt randomly generated symmetric key with it (asymmetric crypto is slow, you don't want to use it directly) and send it back (where you decrypt it) and vice versa. Then you use symmetric key that you have safely exchanged for use in block cypher, lets say Rijndael 265635238 bits (as big numbers mean more safety(tm) /s).

You publish white papers of protocol, get all the cryptographers on your side. Fanboys are screaming, public is applauding, girls wants to sleep with you and president is thankful. What you don't tell is that you also encrypt symmetric key with YOUR public key that is embedded into application and send it along as a "status_check" field.

And everyone is happy forever after. /s

> Your speculation is not interesting to me.

This works in both directions. But bottom line, whitepaper is not the application (and even if it would be, have fun reading http://www.underhanded-c.org/ or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG and who has more motive as the corporation that profits from spying on everyone and everything). It is just as the name says. Whitepaper.

"Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes"

or maybe you will like this one more:

"Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets"

And you dont trust someone as Facebook or Google any more. They have lost trust in ship containers not buckets.

[Grustaf]

> Yes, Facebook could subvert the binary by pushing an update. That is the risk you are accepting.

That's exactly the kind of risk you should never accept when it comes to Facebook.

[mr_gibbins]

Says the ex-Facebook engineer.

[Moodles]

> Whatever they say, they have the keys to decrypt it.

This is a baseless assertion.

[godmode2019]

In Australia its illegal to encrypt user data with out the ability to decrypt it.

Do they offer this service in Australia? Yes. Then they have the keys.

[RandallBrown]

Facebook isn't doing the encrypting. You are. You have the key on the phone.

[34kj2h4234]

You could also have the law enforcement public key that was compelled to be installed in your corespondent keyring, invisibly, re-encrypting all those messages for FB, LEA and IC. That way its all "end-to-end encrypted" and giant public messaging system can be selectively tapped by authorities. Everyone loses!

[Barrin92]

as of a few months ago[1] it seems like Facebook and other tech companies haven't complied with it yet. I think governments are still just pestering them about it.

[1]https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/go...

[seniorivn]

but it is a safe assumption

[sweis]

It's a falsifiable assumption. Audit the binaries if you want to convince yourself. You will see code to generate and use keys locally, with no mechanism to fetch or share keys from a server.

If you want to go beyond generic concerns, there are plenty of academic papers that have looked at Facebook Secret Conversations, found actual issues, and helped get them fixed: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00145-020-09360-1 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-63697-9_... https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-96884-1_...

[na85]

Why are you so eager to trust an organization that has so often demonstrated it's not worthy of trust?

This is Facebook, for pete's sake. The same company that conducted psychological experiments with zero clinical/ethical oversight by manipulating its users' feeds to see if it could cause depression/anxiety (or the opposite).

Facebook is evil and you should not trust them even a little bit.

[dmt0]

He is so eager, because he was a software engineer at Facebook. His site is in his profile.

[mattigames]

The app can auto-update itself at any time and install some binaries that do share the key with the server; trust is virtue of every single thing the company (im this case FB) can do and auto-updates is one of them.

[snypher]

"When you report a secret conversation, recent messages from that conversation will be decrypted and sent securely from your device to our Help Team for review."

So they either have the keys or a way to force the client to decrypt.

[colejohnson66]

Or it’s decrypted on your side, and you reporting it sends the decrypted form. How else would a “report” button work if not with unencrypted data? Not everything is a conspiracy.

[arrosenberg]

Trust is earned.