Mar 08, 2024NewsroomInteroperability / Encryption

Meta has offered details on how it intends to implement interoperability in WhatsApp and Messenger with third-party messaging services as the Digital Markets Act (DMA) went into effect in the European Union.

“This allows users of third-party providers who choose to enable interoperability (interop) to send and receive messages with opted-in users of either Messenger or WhatsApp – both designated by the European Commission (EC) as being required to independently provide interoperability to third-party messaging services,” Meta’s Dick Brouwer said.

DMA, which officially became enforceable on March 7, 2024, requires companies in gatekeeper positions – Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and ByteDance – to clamp down on anti-competitive practices from tech players, level the playing field, as well as compel them to open some of their services to competitors.

As part of its efforts to comply with the landmark regulations, the social media giant said it expects third-party providers to use the Signal Protocol, which is used in both WhatsApp and Messenger for end-to-end encryption (E2EE).

The third-parties are also required to package the encrypted communications into message stanzas in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Should the message contain media content, an encrypted version is downloaded by Meta clients from the third-party messaging servers using a Meta proxy service.

The company is also proposing what’s called a “plug-and-play” model that allows third-party providers to connect to its infrastructure for achieving interoperability.

“Taking the example of WhatsApp, third-party clients will connect to WhatsApp servers using our protocol (based on the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol – XMPP),” Brouwer said.

“The WhatsApp server will interface with a third-party server over HTTP in order to facilitate a variety of things including authenticating third-party users and push notifications.”

Furthermore, third-party clients are mandated to execute a WhatsApp Enlistment API when opting into its network, alongside providing cryptographic proof of their ownership of the third-party user-visible identifier when connecting or a third-party user registers on WhatsApp or Messenger.

The technical architecture also has provisions for a third-party provider to add a proxy or an intermediary between their client and the WhatsApp server to provide more information about the kinds of content their client can receive from the WhatsApp server.

“The challenge here is that WhatsApp would no longer have direct connection to both clients and, as a result, would lose connection level signals that are important for keeping users safe from spam and scams such as TCP fingerprints,” Brouwer noted.

“This approach also exposes all the chat metadata to the proxy server, which increases the likelihood that this data could be accidentally or intentionally leaked.”

Mar 02, 2024NewsroomSpyware / Privacy

A U.S. judge has ordered NSO Group to hand over its source code for Pegasus and other products to Meta as part of the social media giant’s ongoing litigation against the Israeli spyware vendor.

The decision, which marks a major legal victory for Meta, which filed the lawsuit in October 2019 for using its infrastructure to distribute the spyware to approximately 1,400 mobile devices between April and May. This also included two dozen Indian activists and journalists.

These attacks leveraged a then zero-day flaw in the instant messaging app (CVE-2019-3568, CVSS score: 9.8), a critical buffer overflow bug in the voice call functionality, to deliver Pegasus by merely placing a call, even in scenarios where the calls were left unanswered.

In addition, the attack chain included steps to erase the incoming call information from the logs in an attempt to sidestep detection.

Court documents released late last month show that NSO Group has been asked to “produce information concerning the full functionality of the relevant spyware,” specifically for a period of one year before the alleged attack to one year after the alleged attack (i.e., from April 29, 2018, to May 10, 2020).

That said, the company doesn’t have to “provide specific information regarding the server architecture at this time” because WhatsApp “would be able to glean the same information from the full functionality of the alleged spyware.” Perhaps more significantly, it has been spared from sharing the identities of its clientele.

“While the court’s decision is a positive development, it is disappointing that NSO Group will be allowed to continue keeping the identity of its clients, who are responsible for this unlawful targeting, secret,” said Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, head of the Security Lab at Amnesty International.

NSO Group was sanctioned by the U.S. in 2021 for developing and supplying cyber weapons to foreign governments that “used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”

The development comes as Recorded Future revealed a new multi-tiered delivery infrastructure associated with Predator, a mercenary mobile spyware managed by the Intellexa Alliance.

The infrastructure network is highly likely associated with Predator customers, including in countries like Angola, Armenia, Botswana, Egypt, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Oman, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, and Trinidad and Tobago. It’s worth noting that no Predator customers within Botswana and the Philippines had been identified until now.

“Although Predator operators respond to public reporting by altering certain aspects of their infrastructure, they seem to persist with minimal alterations to their modes of operation; these include consistent spoofing themes and focus on types of organizations, such as news outlets, while adhering to established infrastructure setups,” the company said.