There is no downside and it literally takes 4 taps of your finger. That being said, anyone using the messenger service should turn on WhatsApp security settings. So at best, this is a notification, not a prevention. Messages that you sent, but have not yet been delivered (these are messages which only have a single checkmark next to them) will still be automatically resent to the new key, and there is no way to stop WhatsApp from doing this. By turning on “Security Notifications,” you can at least be notified when one of your contact’s key changes. However, with a simple change in the settings, you can partially protect yourself. When a user’s key changes, it could be for legitimate reasons (they got a new cell phone) or dangerous ones (an attack is impersonating them). WhatsApp uses public key cryptography, like SSL/TLS and PGP, which protects messages by encrypting them a unique pair of keys that belongs to each user. ”…there is a legitimate concern over WhatsApp’s default settings, which do not notify users if their contact’s key changes.”īut, underlying the outrage, there is a legitimate concern over WhatsApp’s default settings, which do not notify users if their contact’s key changes. If you are interested in learning about the controversy over the “backdoor” claim, we wrote about it in-depth last week. The Info Sec community reacted loudly – denouncing their claim and stressing the dangers of mislabeling the problem as a “backdoor.” To those outside of the community, this may sound like a debate over semantics, but the claims play into a bigger discussion around user security and reporting. But there was a legitimate security risk as a result of a default setting in WhatsApp, which was an active choice by the developers to make the app more usable for its largely mainstream audience. The reality was more complicated than that – WhatsApp did not have a backdoor. Last week, The Guardian sparked controversy with a story about a “backdoor” in the popular messenger WhatsApp. In Hashing Out Cyber Security It only takes 15 seconds to turn on WhatsApp Security Settings.