On Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that WhatsApp will be rolling out E2EE chat backups on iOS as well as Android to enhance the security of the backup.
The E2EE chat backup will offer better security over normal chat backups. With E2EE, the threat actors won’t be able to access your chat backups regardless of where the backups are stored.
At present, the chat messaging app, WhatsApp lets users take the backup of their chats and store them to cloud storage services.
In WhatsApp for Android, the backups are stored on Google Drive whereas, for iOS users, the backup is stored on the iCloud. Cloud backups are essential for seamless restoration of the messages when you reinstall WhatsApp or move to a new device.
The WhatsApp E2EE (end-to-end-encrypted) cloud backups mean that the backups can’t be accessed by the person who has access to your phone, executes a MiTM attack, or perform a SIM swap attack.
WhatsApp Receives E2EE Chat Backups
Soon WhatsApp will allow users to create E2EE chat backups and store them on the cloud storage. Now, users will be able to set a password to encrypt the backups before they are uploaded to Google Drive or iCloud.
On Thursday, Facebook announced that WhatsApp users will be able to secure their E2EE backup either with a password of their choice or with a 64-digit encryption key that you only access.
Furthermore, Facebook clear stated that neither WhatsApp nor the backup service provider will have access to the encryption key or read your chat backups.
The same password must be used to restore the backups in the future. This restricts the backups from being accessed by anyone else.
Facebook additionally said that this feature is slowly being rolled out to WhatsApp beta users.
Once you get this feature update, you can enable the E2EE chat backup service by following the below steps:
- Open WhatsApp in your device
- Then open Settings
- Next, tap the Chat option in the Settings Menu and then tap Chat Backup and lastly the End-to-end Encrypted Backup
- Tap Cotinue options and then follow the process as shown in the screen and then enter either 64 digit key or password.
- Then, click on Done button (wait for the backup to complete). During backup you may be prompted to connect the device to power.
On enabling the end-to-end encrypted backups, you can restore the backup only if the correct password is inputted.
However, you can disable this feature by going back to the End-to-end Encrypted Backup setting and switch it off.
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