During the summer of 2021, WhatsApp engaged NCC Group’s Cryptography Services team to conduct an independent security assessment of its End-to-End Encrypted Backups project. End-to-End Encrypted Backups is an hardware security module (HSM) based key vault solution that aims to primarily support encrypted backup of WhatsApp user data. This assessment was performed remotely, as a 35 person-day effort by three NCC Group consultants over the course of five weeks. NCC Group and the WhatsApp team scheduled the retesting of findings, and preparation of this public report a few weeks later, following the delivery of the initial security assessment.
The Public Report for this review may be downloaded below:
Jennifer Fernick is the Global Head of Research at NCC Group. She can be found on Twitter at @enjenneer.