How Easy Is It For The Police To Hack Into Encrypted WhatsApp Chats? We Try To Find Out

At the moment, Bollywood isn¡¯t going through its best time. With cinema halls shut down due to the novel coronavirus, no new movies in the offing and delayed shoots due to the lockdown, things aren't looking up either. In yet another setback, Bollywood has come under another eclipse -- the drug investigation connected to the death of Sushant Singh Rajput and his girlfriend Rhea Chakraborty.

AFP

The murder investigation has now turned into a drugs investigation headed by the Narcotics Control Bureau who have allegedly found information that several A-listers in Bollywood, including Deepika Padukone, were consuming drugs like hash, weed, through messages on their WhatsApp chats.

This only makes us wonder how easy or difficult it is for the authorities to get hold of our WhatsApp chats, which the messaging company touts to be ¡®end-to-end encrypted¡¯ to offer utmost privacy. In reality, the process isn¡¯t that difficult.

How did the chats of Deepika Padukone get leaked?

In the aforementioned case which revealed Bollywood celebrities have allegedly consumed drugs, the link here is Jaya Saha - former talent manager of Sushant Singh Rajput who was one of the people involved in the investigation. Authorities had gained access to her phone, and while investigating they stumbled upon one of the group chats which involved Deepika Padukone and her manager, Karishma. They were seen having discussions of procuring hash, along with similar conversations with other celebrities.

How are WhatsApp chats retrieved?

Now, when authorities investigate a certain phone, they have tools that can breach into the phone easily, regardless of its locks - something we¡¯ve already shown you when we saw the tools Mumbai police used to breach into a criminal¡¯s phone.

Cellebrite

Now, once access is gained to a phone, they create a clone of the device - an exact duplicate, so to speak. This clone, however, is completely digital. This includes data of the phone from the very first time it was turned on - call logs, texts, app data and of course WhatsApp Chats.

In case you were still thinking about end-to-end encryption, WhatsApp is known to store data of chats on the phone¡¯s memory as well as sync chats on the cloud (if you have the option enabled). With phone cloning, investigators can go through the deepest extent of the chats, even if the messages were deleted and retrieve them as evidence.

If they¡¯re not on the phone, but on the cloud, since cloning has already given them access to your phone and by extension, all of your accounts, the backed-up chats are also not very difficult to retrieve.

What about deleted data?

In case, you were wondering that you¡¯re all safe if you¡¯ve reset the phone and erased all the data, you¡¯re wrong. Deleted files from phone's memory can still be retrieved using forensic tools. The softwares that these agencies have access to can recover deleted files from the time the phone first booted. The only way authorities cannot gain access to a device is when it's physically damaged to an extent that it¡¯s non-functional.

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Who has the authority to check WhatsApp Chats?

In India, 10 central agencies (including Enforcement Directorate, Narcotics Control Bureau and Central Bureau of Investigation) have the power under the Information Technology Act to breach into the phone and look under every nook and cranny to find relevant evidence.