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by jeroenhd 838 days ago
I think it's quite fair to demand basic security compliance for implementing an E2EE messenger.

That said, I'm sure we'll see open source libraries pop up everywhere to communicate with WhatsApp directly. There already are unofficial WhatsApp clients in various forms, but now they can use the protocol without risking breakage because they reverse engineered the contents of the protocol itself.

I think there will be plenty of space for the Beeper Minis out there right now.

2 comments

> I'm sure we'll see open source libraries pop up everywhere to communicate with WhatsApp directly.

How so? Each of them would need approval by Meta + signing an NDA, and I can easily see that ruling out open source libraries.

Most of the protocol is already reverse engineered. Once less heavily obfuscated apps start using the external messengers API, implementing the rest of the protocol should be a lot easier.
> I think it's quite fair to demand basic security compliance for implementing an E2EE messenger.

That's really a decision you should make, and not WhatsApp – "do I trust this arp242 guy and his GitHub repo?"

And some auditing isn't necessarily too bad, I guess, but a lot of this goes far beyond "basic security"; it's the type of "corporate checkbox security" that we all know works so well.