Insecurities Of WhatsApp's, Signal's, And Threema's Group Chats

Recently, the theoretical and practical analysis of secure instant messenger protocols received much attention, but the focus of prior evaluations mostly lay in one-to-one communication. In this blog post we want to presents the results of our work that focuses on group chat protocols of three major instant messenger applications; namely Signal, WhatsApp, and Threema.

In this blog post, we aim to focus on the practical impact and the found weaknesses identified by our analysis. The interested reader may also look into our paper for more details.


Our Aim and What We Were Looking For

End-to-end encryption protects the confidentiality of communication that is forwarded via central servers to the designated receivers. As a consequence, neither parties on the network route of the messages, nor the provider of the central server (e.g. the WhatsApp server) should be able to read any information out of the observation of the communication. In particular, no other user of the application should have access to the communication. Further it might be desirable to require that also the messages' integrity is end-to-end protected and that a sender is informed about the delivery state of sent messages.
Delivery state information in Signal (upper screenshot) and WhatsApp (lower screenshot)

In a two party scenario, this analysis is rather fixed to two components of the protocol: the key establishment between both parties and the communication channel protection using the established key (mostly consisting of an encryption algorithm and a scheme for providing integrity like MACs or signature schemes).

Regarded attackers


In a group setting, the same attackers apply (network, provider, other users). However the requirements for secure communication differ. It is further necessary that only group members can write to and read content from the group. Additionally, only administrators of the group are able to add new members.

In addition to these standard requirements, we also evaluated the protocols' security guarantees if the client's secrets were revealed (forward secrecy and future secrecy).

Our Approach

We analyzed the mentioned protocols by reading the source code and debugging the apps. We also used alternative open source implementations of Threema and WhatsApp as a help and we traced the network traffic. When using alternative implementations, we only took incoming traffic into account, which was generated by official applications. Thereby we extracted the protocol descriptions and evaluated them regarding the defined requirements.

Our Findings

In WhatsApp and Threema, the provider was able to manipulate the set of members. Threema only allowed the provider to rewind the set of members to a previous state. As a consequence previously removed members could have been added to the group again. The WhatsApp provider is able to arbitrarily manipulate the member set. Thereby further members and administrators can be added to the group. Since the authenticity of group manipulation is not protected, the WhatsApp provider can set the real group administrator as the source of manipulation even though this administrator was not active.

Since Signal's key exchange protocol provides future secrecy, we also evaluated the protocol's ability to recover into a secure group state after a member's state was compromised. The essential weakness here is that a sender only needs to know the static group ID to send a message to the group. If a group member receives a message with the correct group ID, no verification regarding the current member set takes place but the message is directly added to the group communication. Consequently it is sufficient to retrieve the group ID in order to send messages to the group. Since Signal treats content messages the same way as messages for the manipulation of the group set, an attacker who knows the group ID can add herself to the group and thereby read the subsequent group communication.

In addition to this, in all cases the delivery state of sent messages was not securely provided. Threema's group chats do not inform the sender about the delivery state while Signal and WhatsApp do not protect the delivery information on the end-to-end layer. Therefore the central provider can forge this information and drop messages without letting the communicating parties detect this.

Also the order of messages was manipulable for the providers of the applications such that the provider is able to deliver the messages in a different order than they were sent. Threema's weakness of rewinding a group state results from missing replay attack protection.

Impact of Weaknesses

Even though end-to-end encryption is implemented in all analyzed applications, the central providers can largely manipulate the communication in groups and partially also read it.
In all applications, the provider can undetectably drop and reorder messages during the delivery and thereby manipulate the view of the communication such that further attacks can be obfuscated.
The central servers of WhatsApp can be used to add arbitrary users to groups and thereby receive their communication.
To achieve the same result for Signal, it suffices to retrieve the group ID. An earlier member who left the group once still knows this ID since it is static. However, in contrast to WhatsApp, the origin of the manipulation is correctly displayed in the Signal application (which was not the fact when we started our analysis).

As a result, the end-to-end protection of WhatsApp is not sufficient to reach confidentiality in groups. For Signal no future secrecy is reached in groups and Threema was vulnerable to replay attacks which resulted in further weaknesses.

Responsible Disclosure

We disclosed our findings to the developers and received varying response. Threema updated their protocol in version 3.14 such that our attacks are not feasible anymore. Moxie Marlinspike responded that Signal is "working on an entirely new group mechanism that we should be deploying soon". WhatsApp did not hold out the prospect of fixing the described vulnerabilities (Update 01/18: According to Facebook's Security Head, the invite links make a fix more difficult [1]; we proposed a way to solve this issue [2]).

[1] https://twitter.com/alexstamos/status/951169036947107840
[2] https://web-in-security.blogspot.de/2018/01/group-instant-messaging-why-baming.html

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14.6.2014 draw 297/14 19 Mei 2013 23 Jun 2013 24.04.2013 25 Jun 2013 4 mei 2014 - draw 278/14 6 mei 2014 Adakah anda bersetuju dengan pernyataan tentang zakar ini? BERIKUT MERUPAKAN NOMBOR RAMALAN UNTUK MAGNUM 4D PADA 30 OGOS 2014 draw 143/13 draw 279/14 DRAW ID 098/13. DRAW ID 099/13: NOMBOR RAMALAN UNTUK MAGNUM 4D PADA 4 MEI 2013 DRAW ID 139/13. DRAW ID 141/13. DRAW ID 142/13 DRAW ID 142/13 / PREDICTION FOR MAGNUM 4D COUNTER ON 3 AUGUST 2013 ID CABUTAN 098/13 / PREDICTION FOR MAGNUM 4D COUNTER ON 1 MAY 2013 ID CABUTAN 099/13 / ID CABUTAN 139/13 / PREDICTION FOR MAGNUM 4D COUNTER ON 27 JULY 2013 ID CABUTAN 141/13 / PREDICTION FOR MAGNUM 4D COUNTER ON 31 JULY 2013 Keputusan dan perbandingan antara nombor ramalan dan result Magnum 4D pada 31 Julai 2013 Keputusan Magnum 4D Kerja part time/ sambilan : Peluang tambah pendapatan Magnum 4d result 1 May 2013 Draw 098/13 Magnum draw 094/13 nombor 4d 6.7.2014 308/14 Nombor 4d untuk hari ini : 21/04/2013 nombor magnum 4d draw 107/13 ; Ahad nombor magnum 4d untuk draw 101/13: 7 mei 2013 ( magnum 4d prediction number for draw 101/13 : 7 may 2013 Nombor ramalan 4d : 24.04.2013 Nombor ramalan dan keputusan Magnum 4D draw 119/13 pada 15 Jun 2013 Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D 4 Ogos 2013 draw 143/13 Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D 7 Ogos 2013 draw 144/13 nombor ramalan Magnum 4D dan result pada 4 Ogos 2013 Nombor ramalan magnum 4d draw 112/13 29 Mei 2013 Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D pada 1 Jun 2013 draw 113/13 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada 14.6.2014 draw 297/14 Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D pada 2 Jun 2013 Draw 114/13 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada 23 ogos 2014 draw 329/14 Nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada 26.05.2015 draw 467/15 - special draw Nombor Ramalan Magnum 4D pada 30 April 2014 draw 276/14 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada 30 ogos 2014 draw 333/14 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada 4 mei 2014 - draw 278/14 Nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada 5 julai 2014 hari sabtu draw 307/14 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada 7 september 2014 draw 338/14 ( 7.9.2014/338/14) nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada 8 Februari 2014 (8/2/2014) draw 235/14 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada hari ahad nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada hari ahad 6 julai 2014 draw 308/14 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada hari rabu 25 september 2013 draw 168/13 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada hari rabu 9 julai 2014 draw 309/14 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada hari sabtu nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada hari sabtu 13.9.2014 draw 340/14 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada hari sabtu 26 oktober 2013 draw 182/13 nombor ramalan magnum 4d pada hari selasa Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D untuk draw 118/13 pada hari Rabu 12 Jun 2013 Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D untuk draw 119/13 pada hari Sabtu 16 Jun 2013 Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D untuk draw 120/13 pada hari Ahad 16 Jun 2013 Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D untuk draw 121/13 pada hari Rabu 19 Jun 2013. Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D untuk draw 123/13 pada hari Ahad Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D untuk draw 124/13 pada hari Selasa (special draw) Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D untuk draw 231/14 pada hari Sabtu 1 Februari 2014 Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D untuk hari Sabtu 7 Ogos 2013 draw 149/13 Nombor ramalan Magnum 4D untuk hari Selasa 3 September 2013 draw 158/13 | SPECIAL DRAW Nombor ramalan MAGNUM 4D untuk special draw 111/13 28 Mei 2013 Nombor ramalan untuk hari Rabu nombor ramalan untuk MAGNUM 4D Nombor ramalan untuk magnum 4d draw 105/13: 15 Mei 2013 Nombor ramalan untuk magnum 4d draw 120/13 dan keputusan/result magnum 4d pada 16 Jun 2013 NOMBOR RAMALAN UNTUK MAGNUM 4D PADA 1 MEI 2013 NOMBOR RAMALAN UNTUK MAGNUM 4D PADA 27 JULAI 2013 NOMBOR RAMALAN UNTUK MAGNUM 4D PADA 3 OGOS 2013 NOMBOR RAMALAN UNTUK MAGNUM 4D PADA 31 JULAI 2013 nombor ramalan untuk magnun 4d pada 3 mei 2014-277/14 nombor untuk magnum 4d draw 095/13 : 27 April 2013 PREDICTION FOR MAGNUM 4D ON 4 MAY 2013 ramalan magnum 4d 9.7.14 309/14 Ramalan pada 12 Jun 2013 dan keputusan Magnum 4D Result 21.4.2013 Cash Sweep Result 21.4.2013 DaMaCai Result 21.4.2013 Magnum Result 21.4.2013 Toto special draw 28 Mei 2013 special draw pada 28 MEI 2013. TERKINI| TERBARU: nombor magnum 4d 7 mei 2013; 101/13 ; special draw Toto draw 3871/13

**Penafian**

Nombor ramalan hanyalah sebagai panduan dan dicadangkan untuk MAGNUM SAHAJA (atau kaunter lain sekiranya sesuai) . Segala pertaruhan adalah atas risiko anda sendiri.