Tal A. Be'ery, Zengo
We recently discovered a privacy issue with Meta’s WhatsApp, the world’s most popular Instant Messaging (IM) application. Meta’s WhatsApp suffers from a privacy issue that leaks the victims’ device setup information (mobile device + up to 4 linked devices) to any user, even if blocked and not in contacts. Monitoring this information over time allows potential attackers to gather actionable intelligence about victims and their device changes (device replaced/ added /removed). Additionally, message recipients can associate the message with the specific sender device that sent it. The root cause for these issues stems from Signal’s multi device protocol architecture, the Sesame protocol, and as a result these issues are not limited to Meta’s WhatsApp only but probably relevant to most IM solutions, including the privacy-oriented Signal Messenger.
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author = {Tal A. Be{\textquoteright}ery},
title = {{WhatsApp} with privacy? Privacy issues with {IM} {E2EE} in the Multi-device setting},
booktitle = {18th USENIX WOOT Conference on Offensive Technologies (WOOT 24)},
year = {2024},
isbn = {978-1-939133-43-4},
address = {Philadelphia, PA},
pages = {11--16},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot24/presentation/beery},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = aug
}
