International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

CryptoDB

WhatsApp Key Transparency

Authors:
Kevin Lewi
Sean Lawlor
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Presentation: Slides
Abstract: Earlier this year, WhatsApp announced their plans to launch key transparency for all WhatsApp users. Key transparency solutions help strengthen the guarantee that end-to-end encryption provides to private, personal messaging applications in a transparent manner available to all. In this presentation, we will cover how key transparency works, what the improved end user experience is for those wishing to verify their contacts' public keys, and various deployment challenges and considerations we encountered when building our key transparency system. We also have released an open-source library called Auditable Key Directory (AKD) which we use in our deployment, and can potentially serve as a reference point for others that wish to deploy key transparency in the future.
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDdGsKUMYbE
BibTeX
@misc{rwc-2024-35351,
  title={WhatsApp Key Transparency},
  note={Video at \url{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDdGsKUMYbE}},
  howpublished={Talk given at RWC 2024},
  author={Kevin Lewi and Sean Lawlor},
  year=2024
}