WhatsApp's offline chats & local backups to get security against hacks

WhatsApp is reportedly working on a way to secure the offline chat data and local backup on phones of users by adding a new layer of encryption on it.

Observers have been keeping an on WhatsApp launching into a proactive mode, updating and developing small but really helpful features, left, right and centre. Whether it’s as a part of its stable build or underdeveloped features.

🆕 WhatsApp is also working to bring end-to-end encrypted LOCAL backups on WhatsApp beta for Android!
They were working on E2EE backups on Google Drive, but they will extend the feature for local backups as well.

This feature will be available in a future update. pic.twitter.com/2YbulmqiUQ

— WABetaInfo (@WABetaInfo) August 3, 2021

The independent WhatsApp monitor, WABetaInfo, has revealed the next feature in line that WhatsApp is bringing will be an end to end encryption for all the offline chat backups on the device.

The end-to-end encryption on chats has been there since 2014, and recently people saw encryption on cloud backups stored on Google Drive and iCloud (although not all have received this feature). However, this encryption was absent on offline backups of data.

Now WhatsApp’s future version will roll out end-to-end encryption for offline chats. What this means is that no one will be able to access your chats by gaining access to your files. WhatsApp will ask users to set up a password to encrypt their local and cloud backup.

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It would also give you the ability to generate a 64-bit encryption key instead of a password which will be required to be entered whenever one restores their chat on WhatsApp.

But here is a catch: Despite the best possible security feature, it is key to note that if you lose the device that has the backups or if you forget your key/password, you won’t be able to recover the chats then, and even WhatsApp won’t help you get them back.

Anyways, this feature is still in beta mode and we some wait is involved before we can actually know what it is and how it functions.