Whats up with WhatsApp’s Security?
Facebook’s acquisition announcement coincided with the starting week of Project Neptune’s beta program. Project Neptune is Praetorian’s new mobile application security testing platform that allows companies to keep pace with rapid mobile development cycles by incorporating continuous, on-demand security testing. And what’s a better way to properly kick off our beta program than to test a publicly available mobile app worth $19 billion? Within minutes, Project Neptune picked up on several SSL-related security issues affecting the confidentiality of WhatsApp user data that passes in transit to back-end servers. This is the kind of stuff the NSA would love. It basically allows them—or an attacker—to man-in-the-middle the connection and then downgrade the encryption so they can break it and sniff the traffic. These security issues put WhatsApp user information and communications at risk.