Whatsapp collects metadata of users!                

    

After conducting a research, a group of experts told that through the forensic study of WhatsApp, metadata of user’s could be gathered. Phone numbers, call durations and other data is included in it.

At the University of New Haven (F. Karpisek of Brno University of Technology in the Czech Republic) researchers conduct a research. Ibrahim Baggili and Frank Breitinger are two researchers which are the co-directors of the Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group. They are worried for the large community of whatsApp users. After research they indicate that the popular messaging service whatsApp collects data like phone numbers, call duration and other private information of the users.

Mr. Ibrahim Baggili said, “Our motive behind this search was to demonstrate the type of data, which could be gathered through forensic study of whatsapp application. He also said that we want to give a path to the technical guys to conduct the additional study into the network forensic of messaging apps.

According to the researchers it is clear that whatsapp implements a protocol named FunXMPP (Extensible messaging and presence protocol).This protocol is used for exchanging the structured data. Researchers were able to view exchanged data with the help of custom made command-line tool, after decrypting the connection between whatsapp client ad servers.

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During a whatsApp call the team has focused on analysis of the signalling messages exchanged established with an Android device. The experts uncovered the codec used by whatsApp after study the authentication process of it. This codec was used for voice media streams, the Opus at 8 or 16 kHz sampling rates. The researcher’s analysis the traffic to find the signals transfers between the clients and servers during a call. Data includes phone numbers, phone call establishment metadata, phone call duration metadata and date-time stamps.

They also explains how whatsApp clients announce their endpoint addresses, for the media streaming, along with the relay server IP addresses during the calls.