Encrypt Electronic signature Word iOS

Warning long answer!Since 1990, I’ve been studying the confidentiality of the messaging systems on computers and mobile devices.It was obvious that the electronic forums, emails and SMS messages could easily be intercepted by 3rd parties. Expecting the service providing companies to develop and implement confidentiality protocols were unrealistic. There were never a general consensus about the need for confidentiality or inter-service protocol development.With the discouragement of the governments many computer scientists shied away from creating software to keep communication confidential between parties.Many spy movies showed advanced technologies to keep the communication between spies and their organizations. The most famous being the Enigma machine used by the Germans during the World War 2. British scientist Alan Turing was the one to develop an early version of today’s computers to solve the mystery of the Enigma machine. Like every visionary he had serious problems with the establishment. After the government discovering that he was gay, he was given 2 options. First option was jail time until he turned heterosexual, or chemical castration. Poor Turing chose the second option and after a while he committed suicide. Every cryptologist today remembers to what happened to the first representative of this science.Without getting into the technological terms (they are all available on Wikipedia) the best way to keep conversation confidential is to use a code book between 2 (or more, but more on that later) parties. A code book is a simple definition and a list of codes that is shared between the parties and each code is used only once. Unless the code book is compromised this method of communication privacy is bullet proof. There is no computer in the world, and there won’t be any in the future that can figure out what the communication is. The only method would be the old school spying on the parties who are communicating between each other.If I need to give an example for the method above, it would be like, let’s choose a newspaper that is accessible to both parties. That will be our message base.Let’s define a codebook now:First code in the book is3–4,6–7,1–2 and repeats itselfsecond code is5–7,3–1,8–5,4–2 and repeats itselfSo let’s say I send you a message today like20,42,15,5,8,67,23,56,12,43,13,11,10Since it is our first message exchange you will use the first code in the book. Also our message base is only known to us which also makes it even more difficult for others to understand the secret message I just sent you.To understand the message, here is what you do: you pick up today’s New York Times which is the newspaper we agreed to use.Take the first number in the secret message which is 20, then look in the codebook for the first code which is 3–4. You go to the 3rd page find the 4th paragraph and get the 20th character and repeat this process for each number in the secret message I sent.Let’s say MI6 is trying to intercept the message, which they do because I sent the message by email or SMS or event with both to you.All they have is 20,42,15,5,8,67,23,56,12,43,13,11,10 and they have no idea what it means. They don’t know which text source we used, which was New York Times and they don’t know the code we used for that message which was 3–4,6–7,1–2. We can even make this more difficult, for each day of the week we use a different newspaper that we agree upon.And let’s say MI6 figures out which newspaper we use for each day, let’s say they even figure out our code mechanism which is the page, paragraph and character to decode the secret message.As long as we use each line of code only once and never repeat used codes, there is virtually no way that MI6 to figure out our conversation. Except of course sending their double o agent to one of us and beating us in the head with an iron bar which would make us sing like a bird and spill all the secrets.As you can see in the example an iron bar, strategically placed on your head with a moderate blow would break all the code we established.That reality aside, if I whisper to your ear the newspaper names and hand you a piece of paper with a list of codes which I also have the same copy, until ve run out of codes there is no way our communication can be interpreted when intercepted.The difficulty in this type of message confidentiality is sharing and keeping a piece of paper with a list of codes and do the code exchange again when the list of codes are depleted and never use a code again.When this is not possible for practical reasons like distance between parties or the number of messages exchanged being too high and frequent the methodology used is computer based encryption (ensuring the confidentiality of communication between parties) of messages.This is also not so unlike what we did in the first example. To create our never ending codes is that for each message we exchange we use 3 constants. You have a master key, a public key and we agree on a mathematical formula which is very very difficult for the computer to solve. The difficulty here ensures that the time to try every combination of variables (without the master key) for the formula is so long, it practically makes it impossible for others to guess our code list.In this method I also have a master key and a public key. To solve the issue of keeping a list of established codes and communicating that between parties we freely exchange our public keys with everyone and when I’m sending you a message, I use your public key (any of my keys except generating a special signature with my private key so that you can validate with my public key that ensures the message has originated really from me) to create a confidential message. When you receive it by email, SMS or regular post mail, you use your private key which can only find out the contents of the confidential message. And since we are talking about computer systems, we protect our private keys with passwords.I don’t like using names given by computer engineers or any other technical person but for the sake of clarification this master/public key and an established algorithm to use is called public private key cryptology.Another term I don’t like is ‘end to end encryption’. This is to confirm that the cryptology method used can not be intercepted by other parties and only the recipient can understand the contents of the message.One company who has developed an implementation of end to end encryption is Open Whisper Systems. They named their product ‘Signal’ which is a platform and also the name of their app on iOS and Android. Their product uses this public private key cryptology to ensure the text and voice communications between parties to stay confidential. Supposedly the infamous NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden uses their app and he considers it quite good.Now let’s circle back to the WhatsApp security issue. WhatsApp is using the protocol established by the Open Whisper Systems for their public private key protected communications (audio, video and text messages).The problem is the user friendliness of the Signal app is not good. There are certain times that these public and private keys have to be changed. 2 example of those times is if you change your phone or uninstall / reinstall your app (whichever app you are using, Signal or WhatsApp)To test the user friendliness of Signal App’s handling the change of the key pairs (public private key combinations) I used my regular human guinea pig Riz. It was very difficult for me to explain what he has to do and also to find the location of the menu items were horribly difficult. After cursing at me and the app designers many times Riz completed the approval of the new key exchange between us so we could communicate again.Let’s have a look into how WhatsApp has implemented this renewal of key pairs between users. Since authenticity of a user can only identified by trusting their private key signed signature and for the likely case of the user have a new phone or has reinstalled the WhatsApp App, WhatsApp servers keep a copy of the secret message until the recipient downloads it. Now let’s say that you sent me a message while I was offline and I changed phones meanwhile. When I get that message from you what the Signal app does is, it warns me and it won’t let you communicate with you until I approve your new public key (in the style of a combined public keys of both parties because there is only one code that needs to be verified on both ends). Instead of asking user to do the verification what WhatsApp does it re-encrypts your message with my new key again (in their explanation by asking your WhatsApp to keep that message in memory in encrypted form and first decrypt then re-encrypt the same message with my new public key) without asking neither of us to re-confirm the identity of both parties.This technically opens up a backdoor for intelligence agencies to decrypt the messages between parties.How does that happen? WhatsApp confirms App installation by SMS confirmation. Let’s say I want to intercept your WhatsApp messages. I send a team in a delivery van which looks like a repair van but which has a mobile communication signal jammer to your home address. The jamming is smart enough to make your phone think it is still in network coverage so you don’t suspect a thing unless you try to make a call which will look like mobile network is crowded and unavailable. While I knock your phone off the network I can do 2 things, I can either intercept any SMS messages which comes your way in my service van, or give a court order to the mobile phone company to give me a copy of your SMS messages in real time.Then I install WhatsApp on a new phone, enter your phone number as my number and receive a copy of the SMS confirmation with the verification number and enter it in WhatsApp. From that moment on I will receive any waiting (since I knocked you off mobile network) and any news messages WhatsApp users send to you.Intentional or unintentional this is a secret door that can be easily used by government agencies.If I used the above technique to intercept messages between Signal users, what would happen were to be, first I couldn’t receive any messages waiting in the cloud because Signal does not keep messages in the cloud, when you are offline, the message waits in the sender’s Signal App. When the sender tries to send a new or resend the unsent message to you, my new installation of Signal app on my government agency phone will inform your friend, the sender that I’ve changed our shared agreed secret code and asks your friend if s/he wants to approve this new installation on the other end by confirming the new shared secret code with you. When s/he calls you on your landline, you say you haven’t installed a new WhatsApp on your phone or changed phones, you both understand that there is another party in between trying to intercept your messages.Now, WhatsApp says that there is an option in their App, under Settings / Account / Security / Show Security Notifications which is by default off. If you turn this ON then their claim is you will receive notifications when a contact’s security code has changed. They don’t say if the messages will still be delivered in spite of a security notification or not. They add that ‘The messages you send your calls are encrypted regardless of this setting, WHEN POSSIBLE’. I capitalized the last 2 words, what the heck ‘WHEN POSSIBLE’ mean? They also do not say anything about the messages you are going to receive. Even though you enable this warning setting on, if your friend’s setting is not on, they will not be notified if the messages they are sending to you are intercepted.This unintentional secret door is called a ‘user friendly design choice’ by WhatsApp. It is such a user friendly design choice it is government agents friendly as well. I can’t imagine how many diplomats already delivered confidential messages to enemy agencies using WhatsApp. Diplomats in Brussels wake up and smell the coffee…

Since 1990, I’ve been studying the confidentiality of the messaging systems on computers and mobile devices.It was obvious that the electronic forums, emails and SMS messages could easily be intercepted by 3rd parties. Expecting the service providing companies to develop and implement confidentiality protocols were unrealistic. There were never a general consensus about the need for confidentiality or inter-service protocol development.With the discouragement of the governments many computer scientists shied away from creating software to keep communication confidential between parties.Many spy movies showed advanced technologies to keep the communication between spies and their organizations. The most famous being the Enigma machine used by the Germans during the World War 2. British scientist Alan Turing was the one to develop an early version of today’s computers to solve the mystery of the Enigma machine. Like every visionary he had serious problems with the establishment. After the government discovering that he was gay, he was given 2 options. First option was jail time until he turned heterosexual, or chemical castration. Poor Turing chose the second option and after a while he committed suicide. Every cryptologist today remembers to what happened to the first representative of this science.Without getting into the technological terms (they are all available on Wikipedia) the best way to keep conversation confidential is to use a code book between 2 (or more, but more on that later) parties. A code book is a simple definition and a list of codes that is shared between the parties and each code is used only once. Unless the code book is compromised this method of communication privacy is bullet proof. There is no computer in the world, and there won’t be any in the future that can figure out what the communication is. The only method would be the old school spying on the parties who are communicating between each other.If I need to give an example for the method above, it would be like, let’s choose a newspaper that is accessible to both parties. That will be our message base.Let’s define a codebook now:First code in the book is3–4,6–7,1–2 and repeats itselfsecond code is5–7,3–1,8–5,4–2 and repeats itselfSo let’s say I send you a message today like20,42,15,5,8,67,23,56,12,43,13,11,10Since it is our first message exchange you will use the first code in the book. Also our message base is only known to us which also makes it even more difficult for others to understand the secret message I just sent you.To understand the message, here is what you do: you pick up today’s New York Times which is the newspaper we agreed to use.Take the first number in the secret message which is 20, then look in the codebook for the first code which is 3–4. You go to the 3rd page find the 4th paragraph and get the 20th character and repeat this process for each number in the secret message I sent.Let’s say MI6 is trying to intercept the message, which they do because I sent the message by email or SMS or event with both to you.All they have is 20,42,15,5,8,67,23,56,12,43,13,11,10 and they have no idea what it means. They don’t know which text source we used, which was New York Times and they don’t know the code we used for that message which was 3–4,6–7,1–2. We can even make this more difficult, for each day of the week we use a different newspaper that we agree upon.And let’s say MI6 figures out which newspaper we use for each day, let’s say they even figure out our code mechanism which is the page, paragraph and character to decode the secret message.As long as we use each line of code only once and never repeat used codes, there is virtually no way that MI6 to figure out our conversation. Except of course sending their double o agent to one of us and beating us in the head with an iron bar which would make us sing like a bird and spill all the secrets.As you can see in the example an iron bar, strategically placed on your head with a moderate blow would break all the code we established.That reality aside, if I whisper to your ear the newspaper names and hand you a piece of paper with a list of codes which I also have the same copy, until ve run out of codes there is no way our communication can be interpreted when intercepted.The difficulty in this type of message confidentiality is sharing and keeping a piece of paper with a list of codes and do the code exchange again when the list of codes are depleted and never use a code again.When this is not possible for practical reasons like distance between parties or the number of messages exchanged being too high and frequent the methodology used is computer based encryption (ensuring the confidentiality of communication between parties) of messages.This is also not so unlike what we did in the first example. To create our never ending codes is that for each message we exchange we use 3 constants. You have a master key, a public key and we agree on a mathematical formula which is very very difficult for the computer to solve. The difficulty here ensures that the time to try every combination of variables (without the master key) for the formula is so long, it practically makes it impossible for others to guess our code list.In this method I also have a master key and a public key. To solve the issue of keeping a list of established codes and communicating that between parties we freely exchange our public keys with everyone and when I’m sending you a message, I use your public key (any of my keys except generating a special signature with my private key so that you can validate with my public key that ensures the message has originated really from me) to create a confidential message. When you receive it by email, SMS or regular post mail, you use your private key which can only find out the contents of the confidential message. And since we are talking about computer systems, we protect our private keys with passwords.I don’t like using names given by computer engineers or any other technical person but for the sake of clarification this master/public key and an established algorithm to use is called public private key cryptology.Another term I don’t like is ‘end to end encryption’. This is to confirm that the cryptology method used can not be intercepted by other parties and only the recipient can understand the contents of the message.One company who has developed an implementation of end to end encryption is Open Whisper Systems. They named their product ‘Signal’ which is a platform and also the name of their app on iOS and Android. Their product uses this public private key cryptology to ensure the text and voice communications between parties to stay confidential. Supposedly the infamous NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden uses their app and he considers it quite good.Now let’s circle back to the WhatsApp security issue. WhatsApp is using the protocol established by the Open Whisper Systems for their public private key protected communications (audio, video and text messages).The problem is the user friendliness of the Signal app is not good. There are certain times that these public and private keys have to be changed. 2 example of those times is if you change your phone or uninstall / reinstall your app (whichever app you are using, Signal or WhatsApp)To test the user friendliness of Signal App’s handling the change of the key pairs (public private key combinations) I used my regular human guinea pig Riz. It was very difficult for me to explain what he has to do and also to find the location of the menu items were horribly difficult. After cursing at me and the app designers many times Riz completed the approval of the new key exchange between us so we could communicate again.Let’s have a look into how WhatsApp has implemented this renewal of key pairs between users. Since authenticity of a user can only identified by trusting their private key signed signature and for the likely case of the user have a new phone or has reinstalled the WhatsApp App, WhatsApp servers keep a copy of the secret message until the recipient downloads it. Now let’s say that you sent me a message while I was offline and I changed phones meanwhile. When I get that message from you what the Signal app does is, it warns me and it won’t let you communicate with you until I approve your new public key (in the style of a combined public keys of both parties because there is only one code that needs to be verified on both ends). Instead of asking user to do the verification what WhatsApp does it re-encrypts your message with my new key again (in their explanation by asking your WhatsApp to keep that message in memory in encrypted form and first decrypt then re-encrypt the same message with my new public key) without asking neither of us to re-confirm the identity of both parties.This technically opens up a backdoor for intelligence agencies to decrypt the messages between parties.How does that happen? WhatsApp confirms App installation by SMS confirmation. Let’s say I want to intercept your WhatsApp messages. I send a team in a delivery van which looks like a repair van but which has a mobile communication signal jammer to your home address. The jamming is smart enough to make your phone think it is still in network coverage so you don’t suspect a thing unless you try to make a call which will look like mobile network is crowded and unavailable. While I knock your phone off the network I can do 2 things, I can either intercept any SMS messages which comes your way in my service van, or give a court order to the mobile phone company to give me a copy of your SMS messages in real time.Then I install WhatsApp on a new phone, enter your phone number as my number and receive a copy of the SMS confirmation with the verification number and enter it in WhatsApp. From that moment on I will receive any waiting (since I knocked you off mobile network) and any news messages WhatsApp users send to you.Intentional or unintentional this is a secret door that can be easily used by government agencies.If I used the above technique to intercept messages between Signal users, what would happen were to be, first I couldn’t receive any messages waiting in the cloud because Signal does not keep messages in the cloud, when you are offline, the message waits in the sender’s Signal App. When the sender tries to send a new or resend the unsent message to you, my new installation of Signal app on my government agency phone will inform your friend, the sender that I’ve changed our shared agreed secret code and asks your friend if s/he wants to approve this new installation on the other end by confirming the new shared secret code with you. When s/he calls you on your landline, you say you haven’t installed a new WhatsApp on your phone or changed phones, you both understand that there is another party in between trying to intercept your messages.Now, WhatsApp says that there is an option in their App, under Settings / Account / Security / Show Security Notifications which is by default off. If you turn this ON then their claim is you will receive notifications when a contact’s security code has changed. They don’t say if the messages will still be delivered in spite of a security notification or not. They add that ‘The messages you send your calls are encrypted regardless of this setting, WHEN POSSIBLE’. I capitalized the last 2 words, what the heck ‘WHEN POSSIBLE’ mean? They also do not say anything about the messages you are going to receive. Even though you enable this warning setting on, if your friend’s setting is not on, they will not be notified if the messages they are sending to you are intercepted.This unintentional secret door is called a ‘user friendly design choice’ by WhatsApp. It is such a user friendly design choice it is government agents friendly as well. I can’t imagine how many diplomats already delivered confidential messages to enemy agencies using WhatsApp. Diplomats in Brussels wake up and smell the coffee…

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