There Might Be A Way To Trace The Origin Of A WhatsApp Message, And India Might Employ It Soon

Recently, the Indian government has been contemplating how to tackle the fake news issue plaguing WhatsApp. In order to crack down on scammers, they want to be able to pinpoint who first sent a forwarded message. And they may have a way now.

According to V Kamakoti, a professor at IIT-MAdras, there is a way to trace the origin of a WhatsApp message without compromising the app's end-to-end encryption. And not just WhatsApp, this should probably work across other messengers like Messenger too he says.

Kamakoti presented his proposition to a Madras High Court bench composed of Justice S Manikumar and Justice Subramonium Prasad, in relation to a PIL seeking to compel authorities to have citizens link their Aadhaar numbers to social media accounts. The idea is that this will make it easier to investigate cyber crime cases.

Companies like WhatsApp have so far insisted that tracking the original sender of a message is impossible as the encryption prevents them from reading users' texts. Kamakoti meanwhile says it's technically possible to do this by adding an identification tag to messages.

Adding this sort of tag, he says, will not compromise the encryption as it doesn't require a company to read the messages in question. The tag could simply be the phone number of the original sender (at least in the case of WhatsApp). All it would require is for WhatsApp to tweak its code to do this.

Of course, this is still technically a violation of a user's privacy, something WhatsApp agrees with. The Internet Freedom Foundation, which intervened in the initial PIL, is also opposed to the proposal to link Aadhaar to social media accounts, saying it could restrict the fundamental rights of over 600 million internet users in the country.

"Anonymity permits dissent and it can enrich public discourse by overcoming hierarchical structures present in the society which silence individuals based on caste, class, religion, gender, and sexual orientation," the foundation said in its affidavit.

The bench has however gone ahead and directed the professor and his team to file a report on the proposal by July 31, in order to give social media companies a chance to respond.