WhatsApp users now can choose to protect their IP addresses when making calls through just a toggle in the settings.
WhatsApp allows its over 2 billion users to make voice calls and this, according to the company, has come with its own set of security risks.
“Across the software industry, calling products are an attractive vector for cyber attacks. Popular software projects in this space, such as WebRTC and PJSIP, have documented numerous vulnerabilities. Because of the complexity and large number of protocols involved, attackers have many opportunities to find a bug to exploit. Furthermore, calling software often automatically processes incoming packets from callers to optimize call setup and improve performance. This means calling vulnerabilities can often lead to “zero-click” attacks; the victim may not need to even accept the call for the attack to succeed,” write WhatsApp software engineers Daniel Sommermann and Sebastian Messmer and the WhatsApp head of security, Attaullah Baig, in a post on the Facebook Engineering blog.
The IP protection feature during calls was made available to users last month and works by relaying calls through WhatsApp servers.
Mid this year. WhatsApp introduced another feature meant to safeguard users as they make calls known as “Silence Unknown Callers”.
“We launched this feature for the benefits it has for not only privacy but also security. The experience is simple: with the setting turned on, calls from unknown numbers do not ring your phone. Having carefully built this feature to minimize attack surface and external data processing, we are able to help protect users from not only unwanted contact, but also cyber attacks and spyware,” the aforementioned WhatsApp engineers say of the feature.
