If parties A & B both use WhatsApp with the idea being that the app shouldn’t be able to determine the details of the conversation, how does E2EE prevent this?
My understanding is that it really doesn’t matter if E2EE is supported by the app in such cases. Since the app has access to both parties’ devices, it doesn’t have to read/intercept messages in transit if it can just access on device conversation thread for both, or all parties involved. Am I wrong?
In: 5
Neither a 3rd party, nor the service provider can snoop on your messages *in transit* and must obtaining/compromise one of the phones used to send the message.
E2EE was brought in because governments and law enforcement can force service providers to share content/information with them, and because people believed the contents of their messages were used for analytics (which they probably were!). With a warrant, a normal email provider could be forced to share your emails with law enforcement. However with E2EE the service provider doesn’t hold the encryption keys, so they can’t be compelled by law enforcement to share the message contents. They **can** be compelled to share who and when you were communicating with – but not the actual messages themselves.
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