Most of an Influencer’s work is done with a good quality camera, a good editing app and a safe messaging app via their phone. These are the most important factors – apart from the many other softwares they might use. Thus it is extremely important not just to have your chats backed up or protected, but E2EE backed-up too.
For years, in order to safeguard the privacy of people’s messages, the messaging app – WhatsApp has provided end-to-end encryption by default so messages can be seen only by the sender and recipient, and no one in between. People can already back up their WhatsApp message history via cloud-based services like Google Drive and iCloud. WhatsApp does not have access to these backups, and they are secured by the individual cloud-based storage services. Not even WhatsApp or Apple/ Android have access to your E2EE backups.
But now, if people choose to enable end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) backups once available, neither WhatsApp nor the backup service provider will be able to access their backup or their backup encryption key.
How E2EE backups work
Generating encryption keys and passwords
To enable E2EE backups, we developed an entirely new system for encryption key storage that works with both iOS and Android. With E2EE backups enabled, backups will be encrypted with a unique, randomly generated encryption key. People can choose to secure the key manually or with a user password. When someone opts for a password, the key is stored in a Backup Key Vault that is built based on a component called a hardware security module (HSM) — specialized, secure hardware that can be used to securely store encryption keys. When the account owner needs access to their backup, they can access it with their encryption key, or they can use their personal password to retrieve their encryption key from the HSM-based Backup Key Vault and decrypt their backup.
Storing keys in the Backup Key Vault
Backups can be end-to-end encrypted using a 64-digit encryption key.
E2EE backups will be available on iOS and Android in the coming weeks. Check out the end-to-end encrypted backups white paper to learn more.
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