WhatsApp users on iOS and Android will soon be able to secure their backups to iCloud and Google Drive with end-to-end encryption, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed Friday.
“WhatsApp is the first global messaging service at this scale to offer end-to-end encrypted messaging and backups,” Zuckerberg
That work became public when WABetaInfo
Facebook
Backup Key Vaults store passwords in a Hardware Security Module (HSM). Facebook said the vault “will be responsible for enforcing password verification attempts and rendering the key permanently inaccessible after a limited number of unsuccessful attempts to access it,” and that “WhatsApp will know only that a key exists in the HSM. It will not know the key itself.”
The company said “the HSM-based Backup Key Vault service will be geographically distributed across multiple data centers to keep it up and running in case of a data center
Facebook said that end-to-end encrypted backups will be available to WhatsApp users on iOS and Android “in the coming weeks.”