Could you please link the source code for the WhatsApp client, so that we can see the cryptographic keys aren't being stored and later uploaded to Meta's servers, completely defeating the entire point of Signal's E2EE implementation and ratchet protocol?

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akerl_ 11 hours ago | parent [-]

This may shock you, but plenty of cutting-edge application security analysis doesn't start with source code.

There are many reasons, but one of them is that for the overwhelming majority of humans on the planet, their apps aren't being compiled from source on their device. So since you have to account for the fact that the app in the App Store may not be what's in some git repo, you may as well just start with the compiled/distributed app.

	▲	anonym29 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Whether or not other people build from source code has zero relevance to a discussion about the trustworthiness of security promises coming from former PRISM data providers about the closed-source software they distribute. Source availability isn't theater, even when most people never read it, let alone build from it. The existence of surreptitious backdoors and dynamic analysis isn't a knock against source availability. Signal and WhatsApp do not belong in the same sentence together. One's open source software developed and distributed by a nonprofit foundation with a lengthy history of preserving and advancing accessible, trustworthy, verifiable encrypted calling and messaging going back to TextSecure and RedPhone, the other's a piece of proprietary software developed and distributed by a for-profit corporation whose entire business model is bulk harvesting of user data, with a lengthy history of misleading and manipulating their own users and distributing user data (including message contents) to shady data brokers and intelligence agencies. To imply these two offer even a semblance of equivalent privacy expectations is misguided, to put it generously.