Police could lawfully use bulk surveillance techniques to access messages from encrypted communications platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal, following a ruling by the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), a court has heard.
Whatsapp uses the same protocol as signal so MITM is unlikely however there’s no way to know what happens before or after the messages are encrypted/decrypted and sent. They can do that scanning at that stage.
That is different than Signal which (unless they changed something with the profiles thing) was always P2P E2EE. You’re sending encrypted messages directly to the other persons phone, not to a server.
Sender cannot know where the recipient is and using P2P would be resource consuming on all client devices (i.e. everyone who uses Signal) so I guess the messages are routed thru Signal’s servers though messages are encrypted on device with keys that only the messaging parties know (couldn’t find an official diagram for this to confirm).
Whatsapp uses the same protocol as signal so MITM is unlikely however there’s no way to know what happens before or after the messages are encrypted/decrypted and sent. They can do that scanning at that stage.
Sender cannot know where the recipient is and using P2P would be resource consuming on all client devices (i.e. everyone who uses Signal) so I guess the messages are routed thru Signal’s servers though messages are encrypted on device with keys that only the messaging parties know (couldn’t find an official diagram for this to confirm).