WhatsApp and Open Whispers team up to encrypt messages
PUBLISHED : Wednesday, 19 November, 2014, 10:44pm
UPDATED : Thursday, 20 November, 2014, 4:32am
Agence France-Presse in San Francisco
Open Whisper Systems has announced a partnership with WhatsApp to use TextSecure protocol to scramble messages in transit, hiding whatever is inside. Photo: AFP
An online privacy tool endorsed by US whistle-blower Edward Snowden is being used to protect WhatsApp messages from snooping by encrypting them as they travel the internet.
Open Whisper Systems has announced a partnership with Facebook-owned WhatsApp to use TextSecure protocol to scramble messages in transit, hiding whatever is inside.
"WhatsApp deserves enormous praise for devoting considerable time and effort to this project," Open Whisper Systems said in a blog post.
"Even though we're still at the beginning of the roll-out, we believe this already represents the largest deployment of end-to-end encrypted communication in history."
WhatsApp confirmed the announcement but declined to comment further.
TextSecure encryption enabled automatically as a default setting already is built into most recent version of WhatsApp for mobile devices powered by Google-backed Android software, with billions of messages being exchanged daily, according to Open Whisper.
"[WhatsApp co-founder] Brian Acton and the WhatsApp engineering team has been amazing to work with," Open Whisper said.
Open Whisper is an open-source project supported by donations and grants.
During the South By Southwest conference earlier this year, former National Security Agency contractor Snowden praised tools offered by Open Whisper. He connected to the gathering from Russia, where he took refuge after leaking information about wide-scale online surveillance by the United States' National Security Agency.
