[swiley]

What other chat protocol that you've decided replaces IRC handles misbehavior of network owners as easily as IRC does? Whatsapp certainly doesn't.

[corobo]

Isn't WhatsApp the same protocol as Signal under the hood?

[joepie91_]

No. Both use some form of double-ratchet for E2EE, but the messaging protocol itself is completely incompatible.

[corobo]

Fair enough, I don't even remember where I saw it. Some random internet guff information I guess.

Cheers!

[zimpenfish]

> Some random internet guff information I guess.

https://signal.org/blog/whatsapp-complete/

"A year ago [2015], we announced a partnership with WhatsApp and committed to integrating the Signal Protocol into their product, moving towards full end-to-end encryption for all of their users by default."

Now obviously things may have drifted since 2016 but it definitely sounds like - at some point - WhatsApp was based on the Signal protocol.

"Over the past year, we’ve been progressively rolling out Signal Protocol support for all WhatsApp communication across all WhatsApp clients. [...] As of [Apr 2016], the integration is fully complete. Users running the most recent versions of WhatsApp on any platform now get full end-to-end encryption for every message they send and every WhatsApp call they make when communicating with each other. This includes all the benefits of the Signal Protocol – a modern, open source, forward secure, strong encryption protocol for asynchronous messaging systems, designed to make end-to-end encrypted messaging as seamless as possible."

[marcan_42]

"Signal Protocol" here means the encryption design/specification (including the higher levels of key rotation, ratcheting, etc), but not the actual network protocol.

[zimpenfish]

You can see how it's going to be confusing to people though?

[spinax]

Your memory is probably remembering Facebook Messenger, who adopted the Signal protocol some 5 years ago: https://signal.org/blog/facebook-messenger/