WhatsApp on Thursday announced more security features that it will be adding in the coming months to give users' extra layers of privacy and more control over their messages. This comes a day after the instant messaging platform had launched its ‘Stay Safe with WhatsApp’ campaign with user safety at the core.
Here are the new features which WhatsApp has announced.
1. Account Protect: If a user needs to switch his/her WhatsApp account to a new device, the platform will doubly check whether it is the user asking for it. As a result, WhatsApp may ask the user on the old device to verify whether he/she wants to take the step as an extra security check.
2. Device Verification: The Meta-owned platform has launched a security feature to prevent attackers from using an on-device malware. The feature called ‘Device Verification’ needs no action or additional steps from the users, and is a part of the app's broader work to enhance security to the users from growing malware threat.
When someone receives a message, the WhatsApp client retrieves the offline message from the server. This process cannot be impersonated by malware that steals the authentication key and attempts to send messages from outside the users` device.
{{/usCountry}}When someone receives a message, the WhatsApp client retrieves the offline message from the server. This process cannot be impersonated by malware that steals the authentication key and attempts to send messages from outside the users` device.
{{/usCountry}}The ‘Device Verification’ has three new perimeters including a security token stored on the users' device, none used to identify if a client is connecting to retrieve a message from WhatsApp server and an authentication-challenge that is used to asynchronously ping the users` device. These three parameters help prevent malware from stealing the authentication key and connecting to WhatsApp server from outside the users` device.
3. Automatic Security Code: WhatsApp has also launched a cryptographic security feature to automatically verify a secured connection based on key transparency. Like device verification, this feature does not need any additional actions or steps from users.
These key transparency solutions help in strengthening the guarantee that end-to-end encryption provides to private, personal messaging applications in a transparent manner available to all.
WhatsApp is developing a new Auditable Key Directory based on an open-sourced library. It will help the WhatsApp clients to automatically validate that a user’s encryption key is genuine and enables anyone to verify audit-proofs of the directory’s correctness.