A team of researchers at the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security (HGI) at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum have demonstrated that unauthorized participants can sneak into Whatsapp group chats without being invited by the group’s administrator – in theory, at least. This could render meaningless the end-to-end encryption Whatsapp introduced two years ago that is meant to make private messages impenetrable to third parties. Prof. Dr. Jörg Schwenk, Dr. Christian Mainka and Paul Rösler from the Chair for Network and Data Security at the HGI revealed the security flaws on 10 January 2018 at the Real World Crypto Conference in Zurich.
The RUB team also used the conference to reveal security flaws in the Signal and Threema messenger services. These flaws, however, are not as extensive as they are in Whatsapp.
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