“On the security of WhatsApp and Telegram”

I wrote a lot about Telegram and messaging services already, but here’s another (long) article worth reading. This time taking a closer on the security aspects of both messengers.

Germano Gabbianelli writes about the security of WhatsApp and Telegram and shows why WhatsApp isn’t more secure even with default end-to-end encyption.

Saying that WhatsApp is more secure than Telegram, without specifying against what kind of adversary or against what kind of threat, does not mean much.

My main takeaway:

Not everybody has the same security and privacy requirements. Nobody that I know of routinely compares public key fingerprints before starting every E2EE chat. Most of them care about device synchronization and not losing their chat history, though. These people are happily trusting the Service with their data and that is OK. It may be sad, but it is what it is. On the other hand, a whistleblower, or someone concerned about being targeted by a government, for example, is going to be much more careful and will probably take many extra steps to safe-guard their security.

https://germano.dev/whatsapp-vs-telegram/

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