WhatsApp to offer end-to-end encryption option for backup

• BySheetal Sidhu     |    September 13, 2021

WhatsApp to offer end-to-end encryption option for backup. The end-to-end encryption backup feature for WhatsApp – which has two billion users globally – will be available on iOS and Android in the coming weeks. India is among the biggest markets for the Facebook-owned company. As per data cited by the government earlier this year, the Facebook-owned company has 53 crore users in the country. The move assumes significance as WhatsApp presently uses Google Drive to store backups on the Android platform and the backed-up chats are not end-to-end encrypted – making them susceptible to attacks. To resolve this challenge, WhatsApp has been working on a feature that will allow backups to also be end-to-end encrypted. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Friday said another layer of privacy and security is being added to WhatsApp with an end-to-end encryption option for the backups people choose to store in Google Drive or iCloud.

WhatsApp is the first global messaging service at this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups, and getting there was a really hard technical challenge that required an entirely new framework for key storage and cloud storage across operating systems, he said in a post on Facebook. In a whitepaper, WhatsApp said all personal messages, calls, video chats and media sent on the messaging platform have been end-to-end encrypted on the platform since 2016. It emphasised that no one except the user – not even WhatsApp – can access the content. WhatsApp said the in-app backup feature protects user’s content in the event their device is lost or stolen, and enables the transfer of their chat history to a new device.

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