Thursday, March 28

New EU legislation threatens WhatsApp encryption | Digital Trends Spanish

The European Union (EU) reached an agreement to approve a new Digital Markets Law that aims to control and regulate the activity of the main technology companies in the European territory.

It is an ambitious regulation and one that could have far-reaching implications. His most striking measure requires all large companies to develop products that are interoperable with smaller platforms. In the case of messaging services, this would mean end-to-end encrypted services like WhatsApp mixing with less secure protocols like SMS.

In this way, WhatsApp could be forced to give up its end-to-end encryption system, a protocol that means that not even the company can access the content of the messages sent by users.

The Digital Markets Law seeks to break the technological oligopoly and encourage small companies to also compete on equal terms with the giants in the sector. Thus, large companies should have platforms that are compatible with other applications from less large firms, which would allow messages to be sent and received between different apps.

However, security experts are concerned about this new regulation, especially since there is no way to merge different forms of encryption in applications with different design characteristics.

“Trying to reconcile two different cryptographic architectures is simply impossible; one or the other party will have to make important changes. A design that works only when both parties are online will be very different than one that works with stored messages. How do you make those two systems interoperate?” asks Steven Bellovin, an Internet security researcher.

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