Sushant case: As NCB retrieves chat conversations, WhatsApp clarifies on end-to-end encryption

Team Udayavani, Sep 25, 2020, 6:50 PM IST

New Delhi: The NCB team probing the death angle in the Sushant Rajput death case has been able to retrieve Whatsapp chat conversations between the victim’s former girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty and drug peddlers.

Many of these conversations were even leaked to media, which led several people to wonder about the privacy of messages being exchanged between users despite the end-to-end encryption feature being offered by the micro-blogging platform.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is a system of communication where only communicating users can read the messages. Even the provider of the communication service is prevented from being able to access the cryptographic keys needed to decrypt the conversation.

In the backdrop of the chat leaks, WhatsApp has allayed fears of used by reiterating that all messages – SMS, MMS as well as calling are fully end-to-end encrypted and no one apart from the sender and the receiver will be able to access the messages.

In order to prevent any third party from accessing the content on your phone, a user must ensure to use strong passwords or biometric IDs and other security features provided by operating systems.

Meanwhile, it is quite possible that in this case the chats might have been voluntarily revealed to the investigating team to clear one’s name.

It must however be noted that if a court permits, then authorities can crack into your phone and can easily retrieve archived chat conversation which is usually stored on Google Drive (for Android) or iCloud (for iPhone).