Over the past decade, encrypted communication has become the norm for billions of people. Every day, Signal, iMessage, and WhatsApp keep billions of messages, photos, videos, and calls private by using end-to-end encryption by default while Zoom, Discord, and various other services all have options to enable the protection. But despite the technology’s mainstream rise, long-standing threats to weaken encryption keep piling up.
End-to-end encryption is designed so only the sender and receiver of messages have access to their contents governments, tech companies, and telecom providers can’t snoop on what people are saying. It is likely that criminals would find ways to continue to use self-made encryption tools to conceal their messages, meaning that backdoors in mainstream products would succeed at undermining protections for the public without eliminating its use by bad actors.
Over the past few months, there has been a surge in government and law enforcement efforts that would effectively undermine encryption, privacy advocates and experts say, with some of the emerging threats being the most “blunt” and aggressive of those in recent memory.
