End-to-end encryption (E2EE) is the gold standard for secure communication, ensuring that only the intended sender and recipient can read messages. Any communication system that allows third-party access ceases to be truly encrypted, regardless of who that third party is: governments, corporations, or your friendly neighbourhood hacker.

Once a backdoor exists, the encryption does not. Once a communication system can selectively circumvent encryption, it is little more than a performative marketing trick.

The French Push for Backdoors

French lawmakers have been defeated in passing a bill that would force encrypted messaging services to provide decrypted communications within 72 hours upon request. Non-compliance would have resulted in fines of up to 2% of a company’s annual global revenue. Privacy advocates, including Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker, strongly opposed the measure, with Signal stating they would rather exit the French market than compromise encryption.

Supporters of the bill argued that it was necessary to combat drug trafficking and organised crime, but privacy professionals warned that it would lead to mass surveillance and security vulnerabilities. The legislation specifically requires encrypted messaging services like WhatsApp and Signal to implement backdoors, allowing authorities to access user communications.

As the EFF noted, any backdoor designed for law enforcement access becomes a liability for everyone. Once the key exists, it can be discovered, duplicated, and abused. In March 2025, after sustained pressure from privacy organisations and public outcry, the French National Assembly declined to advance the bill, marking a major win for the global defence of encryption.

Digital rights groups continue to caution that introducing intentional vulnerabilities, such as encryption backdoors, jeopardises the security of all users, not just those alleged to have committed crimes. This begs a regularly-raised point: what is illegal in one country may be perfectly lawful elsewhere, yet backdoors have no jurisdictional boundaries. Backdoors intended for law enforcement can be discovered and exploited by other actors, ultimately negating encryption itself.

The fight over encryption and backdoors rumbles on, as it has for years, with governments persistently pushing for legal avenues to bypass encryption and gain access to secure communications. However, cybersecurity experts consistently warn that such measures weaken security for everyone.

Case in point: in 2015, major technology companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft opposed government efforts to introduce backdoors, arguing that it would make systems more vulnerable to cyber threats.

The Key to a Backdoor Will Open for Anyone: The Dual_EC_DRBG Scandal

The risks of backdoors are not theoretical; they have happened before. One of the most infamous examples of a backdoored cryptographic system is the Dual_EC_DRBG (Dual Elliptic Curve Deterministic Random Bit Generator).

Approved by NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) in 2006, this cryptographic random number generator was later found to have serious and deliberately crafted weaknesses.

Why Dual_EC_DRBG Was Suspicious From the Start

The `Dual_EC_DRBG` algorithm raised red flags among cryptographers well before the Snowden leaks eventually confirmed suspicions about an NSA backdoor. Several key things made it stand out among cryptographic standards:

Unusual Design Choices: Dual_EC_DRBG was built using elliptic curve mathematics, which, while not inherently insecure, was unnecessarily complex for random number generators available at the time.
Extremely Slow Performance: It was 1,000 times slower than competing alternatives like HMAC_DRBG and CTR_DRBG. This raised an obvious concern: why would anyone choose a weaker, slower algorithm when more efficient and secure alternatives were readily available?
Leaky State: Cryptographers at Microsoft (Shumow & Ferguson, 2007) demonstrated that the algorithm leaked information about its internal state.
NSA’s Role in Its Development: The algorithm was pushed by the NSA during the standardisation process at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology), which fueled speculation that it was deliberately weakened.

Compromise Global Encryption in 3 Easy Steps

To illustrate how backdoors get embedded, here’s a simplified recipe for undermining global encryption.

Ingredients:

1 cryptographic standard-setting body (preferably one with global influence)
1 powerful intelligence agency with an interest in surveillance
A sprinkle of obscure yet exploitable mathematics
A hefty sum of money ($10 million recommended for best results)
A reputable security company willing to compromise trust for cash

Instructions:

🧈 Prepare Your Algorithm Base: Start by introducing an encryption standard that appears mathematically sound but includes subtle, hard-to-detect vulnerabilities.
🥣Slowly Stir in a Backdoor: A cryptographic system is only as strong as its random number generator.
🧑‍🍳 Bake with Industry Approval: A backdoor is useless unless widely deployed.
🥧 Let It Rest Until Detected

Serving Suggestion:

Enjoy unrestricted access to global communications, at least until security researchers inevitably uncover the flaws. But don’t worry, there’s always another encryption standard to tamper with!

The Fallout

As stated, the NSA helped develop Dual_EC_DRBG and encouraged its adoption within NIST's official guidelines. Dual_EC_DRBG used two elliptic curve points, P and Q, which determined how random numbers were generated. Microsoft researchers Dan Shumow and Niels Ferguson (2007) demonstrated that if an attacker knew the hidden relationship between these points, they could predict future random outputs, effectively breaking encryption. This made Dual_EC_DRBG not just flawed but fundamentally compromised.

In 2013, Edward Snowden’s leaks revealed that the NSA secretly paid RSA Security $10 million to make Dual_EC_DRBG the default random number generator in its BSAFE cryptographic library. This decision ultimately weakened the security of countless products and organisations worldwide. By the time these weaknesses were widely understood, Dual_EC_DRBG had already been embedded into various security products. Organisations that relied on the compromised standard had to scramble for alternatives, but the damage had already been done.

The consequences of the scandal were far-reaching, exposing systemic weaknesses in cryptographic governance and trust in industry standards.

In 2014, NIST withdrew its recommendation, acknowledging the security risks. This effectively confirmed that a widely implemented cryptographic standard had been compromised at the highest levels.
RSA BSAFE was abandoned by security-conscious organisations. Many companies scrambled to replace the compromised random number generator, leading to costly security overhauls.
The case demonstrated the dangers of government-influenced encryption standards. It also fueled a wider debate on the role of intelligence agencies in shaping cybersecurity protocols, prompting calls for greater transparency and independent oversight in cryptographic standard-setting bodies.

The takeaway is clear. Once a cryptographic system is intentionally weakened, it opens the door for anyone to exploit it. The mathematical structure of Dual_EC_DRBG allowed those who knew the relationship between its parameters to predict future random numbers, which could be used to decrypt current and past communications.

It underscored the reality that any deliberate security weakness can be exploited by unintended parties, whether state-sponsored hackers or criminal enterprises.

Backdoors never remain exclusive. Communicate without hidden vulnerabilities. Protect your privacy today with Status.

Status Is a Truly Secure Alternative

While many messaging services centralise their infrastructure, making them vulnerable to government-mandated backdoors, Status takes a fundamentally different approach. Status is designed with true end-to-end encryption that ensures the protection and privacy of messages between senders and recipients.

Total End-to-End Encryption Without Compromise

Status employs Diffie-Hellman key exchange combined with the Double Ratchet PFS Algorithm for 1:1 and group encryption, ensuring that messages remain private between sender and recipient. All encryption and decryption occurs on the users' devices.

Unlike traditional platforms that expose their users’ metadata to their platform servers, Status’ encryption is total, meaning that only the communicating parties have access to the decrypted content and metadata. No third party, including Status itself, can read or intercept messages (even their metadata).

Total Metadata Privacy: No Sender, No Recipient in Transport

Unlike traditional messaging systems that expose sender and recipient metadata, Status ensures that message payloads contain no identifying information during transport. When a message is sent using Status, the network only sees an encrypted payload without any direct link to the sender or receiver.

🗄️ No Central Server Logs: Because Status is decentralised, there are no logs of who is communicating with whom.
🕵️ No Visible Sender or Recipient in the Payload: The message structure itself does not reveal metadata, making it resistant to network-level surveillance.
🛰️ Traffic Analysis Resistance: By leveraging the Waku network’s relay-based propagation, messages are not easily linked to individual users, further enhancing privacy.

This approach ensures that even if someone monitors network traffic, they cannot determine who is talking to whom, making Status a uniquely private and secure communication app

Decentralised Communication Through Waku

Unlike other centralised messaging apps, Status doesn’t rely on centralised servers that store or monitor communications. Instead, Status uses Waku, a peer-to-peer messaging protocol. Waku allows messages to propagate across a distributed network, preventing any single point of control from existing.

This means there is no server where messages can be intercepted or decrypted, making it resistant to censorship and fully private between sender and recipient.

Status is Open Source

Transparency is a core pillar of the Status build philosophy. Unlike proprietary platforms that ask you to take their word for it, Status is open source, meaning that anyone can inspect its code, audit the encryption protocols, and verify exactly how the app works.

🔍 Full Code Transparency: All of Status's code is publicly available on GitHub, allowing independent researchers, developers, and users to review, contribute, and confirm that there are no hidden backdoors or surveillance mechanisms.
🔐 Trust Through Verifiability: In cryptography, trust should be earned, not assumed. Status doesn’t just claim to be secure; it provides the tools and transparency for anyone to prove it.
🌐 Community-Driven Development: By being open source, Status benefits from continuous scrutiny and improvements from a global community of developers and privacy advocates. This decentralised development model ensures that no single authority can introduce a hidden vulnerability unnoticed.

For us in Status, open source is not only a development philosophy, it's a practical defence against secrecy, coercion, and compromise. When you use Status, you're not relying on blind trust. You’re relying on code you can see and security you can verify.

Unlike centralised messaging apps, Status ensures true end-to-end encryption with no metadata leakage. Get the Status app and protect your digital privacy today.

Backdoors Weaken Everyone’s Security

Encryption backdoors are often marketed to the public as tools for law enforcement to fight crime and terrorism. However, history has shown that any security vulnerability introduced for one purpose will inevitably be exploited for another. The moment a backdoor exists, a timer starts ticking down to when it ceases to be exclusive to those it was intended for.

Backdoors introduce systemic vulnerabilities that erode trust in digital infrastructure. Cybersecurity experts have warned repeatedly that such mechanisms do not just allow law enforcement access; they also create new attack vectors.

Once a weakness is publicly known, malicious actors, including state-sponsored hackers and cybercriminal organisations, will attempt to exploit it. We have seen this pattern repeat across multiple industries, from leaked government surveillance tools being repurposed for ransomware attacks to compromised cryptographic standards allowing unintended decryption of secure communications.

The widespread rejection of backdoors by companies such as Apple, Signal, and WhatsApp highlights a fundamental truth: backdoors are not just about security; they are about power and control over communication.

The Unavoidable Reality

The simple truth is that if encryption is designed to be broken for one, it is broken for all. The lessons of Dual_EC_DRBG prove that backdoors do not stay secret, do not remain in the hands of those they were intended for, and ultimately weaken security on a global scale. Weaken encryption, and you weaken security for everyone.

The push for encryption backdoors is frequently justified as a tool for law enforcement to combat crime, yet history has shown that such access introduces systemic risks that go far beyond its intended scope. However, creating a special access mechanism introduces systemic vulnerabilities that can and will be exploited. If backdoors are mandated in France, they would not just affect alleged criminals—they would make the entire country more vulnerable to cyber threats.

The simple truth is: You either have end-to-end encryption, or you don’t. There is no middle ground.

The fight for encryption is ongoing, but you don’t have to wait for governments to make the right choice. Choose a privacy-first alternative today, download Status and experience secure, decentralised messaging.

Additional Reading

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST_SP_800-90A#Hash_DRBG_and_HMAC_DRBG
https://waku.org/
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Ratchet_Algorithm

Samuel Hawksby-Robinson