SC dismisses ban on WhatsApp plea

The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, rejected a petition seeking a ban on WhatsApp. The petition claimed the messaging app to be a threat to national security. The apex court asked the petitioner to approach the government on this matter.

Haryana-based right-to-information (RTI) activist Sudhir Yadav had filed a plea to ban the popular messaging platform which enabled 256-bit end-to-end encryption  - which is difficult for even a supercomputer to decode.

"Even if WhatsApp was asked to break through an individual's message to hand over the data to the government, it too would fail as it does not have the decryption keys either," Yadav said in his petition.

According to Yadav, terrorists or criminals can use WhatsApp to hatch plans that can be a threat to the country. 

The petition also mentioned that in order to decrypt any message on WhatsApp, it would require a high 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,935 key combination which is impossible to for any computer.

Decrypting a single 256-bit encrypted message would take a lot of time, Yadav said.

Other messaging platforms such as Hike and Viber also followed WhatApp's encryption move.