Here is a bad news for the WhatsApp Users. The Supreme Court will hear a petition seeking a ban on WhatsApp on coming Wednesday. This might result in banning the App in India. Yes, you heard it right! The Supreme Court will be examining a petition which seeks the ban on WhatsApp!
This Public Interest Litigation was filed by Haryana-based right-to-information (RTI) activist Sudhir Yadav. He claims that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption isn’t safe and it gives terrorists an easy way to communicate that is impossible to intercept.
The petition added that WhatsApp has started enabling all the messages with 256-bit encryption in April, due to which they can’t be traced or accessed. These messaging apps were helping terrorists and criminal elements by encrypting the messages. WhatsApp will be helpful for criminals and terrorists for chatting and making plans to harm India. Even Intelligence agencies won’t be able to tap their conversations.
“Even if WhatsApp was asked to break through an individual’s message to hand over the data to the government, it too would fail as it does not have the decryption keys either,” Yadav said in his petition.
The petition even said that in order to decrypt any message on WhatsApp, a whopping 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,935 key combinations have to be used, which is almost impossible for even a super computer. Decrypting a single 256-bit encrypted message would take hundreds of years.
The petition also stated that even platforms like Viber, Secure Chat, Hike etc. use high encryption and can cause the threat to the nation. A bench headed by the Chief Justice of India will hear the public interest litigation (PIL) petition on June 29.