Major Security Flaw In WhatsaApp For Android Can Expose Your Messages | TechTree.com

Major Security Flaw In WhatsaApp For Android Can Expose Your Messages

A security issue with WhatsApp for Android means "others" can read your chats.

 

WhatsApp made it to the headlines, after it was bought over by social media giant Facebook for a $19 billion. However, now the app is enjoying the limelight for a different reason as a security consultant found a major loophole its Android version.

 

Bas Bosschert a system administrator, found that WhatsApp leaves its chat histories wide open for rouge apps to gain access to when installed on the same phone. This is possible since WhatsApp saves its database on the phone's SD card, and despite messages being encrypted it isn't much of a hassle to decipher readily available decryption keys.

 

In his blog post. Bosschert states that "since [the] majority of the people allows everything on their Android device, this is not much of a problem. "So, we can conclude that every application can read the WhatsApp database and it is also possible to read the chats from the encrypted databases," He also joked about the entire incident by saying that,"Facebook didn’t need to buy WhatsApp to read your chats."

 

Not only Android phone users are affected due to this lapse of security, as WhatsApp's databases contain all sent as well as received messages. So even if you own an iPhone or Windows Phone handset, your message can be accessed from the Android phone, to which it is sent.

 

However, he adds that Facebook's aid may already be underway. Last month, FB developers released an open-source tool dubbed 'Conceal' for securely storing sensitive app data on the SD cards of Android devices.


TAGS: WhatsApp, privacy issues, instant messaging

 
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