A few weeks ago, I read that Jared Kushner was using WhatsApp for White House business. My first thought was “Lock him up!” My second thought was, “I wonder if I can hack his account.” Since I do not have the power, resources, nor connections to lock him up, I went with the second option.
Upon careful analysis, I discovered that WhatsApp message encryption uses a flawed key generation algorithm that suffers from a probabilistic bias in the keyspace due to the modular reduction often resulting in a key that is less than the order of the group. Knowing this, I launched a RowHammer attack on the server DRAM, flipping target bits, which allowed me to expose the RSA keys after a few million chosen plaintexts. From there it was almost trivial to crack Kushner’s account. I’ll spare you the details, which I’ll be submitting to an academic conference, but the gist of it is that I was able to recover about 65% of his communications. What I discovered is highly troubling. Here are some excerpts. (Apologies that I was not able to recover the full text. I’ll use XXXX to fill in where the text could not be decrypted yet.)
Partially recovered transcript:
Kushner: Dad, (can I call you Dad?) you cannot sell sponsorships for sections of the wall. It will not look good.
Trump: This will be huge. Think how much money we can get for this XXXXX (incomprehensible) bigger than China’s wall. XXXX (incomprehensible) I mean China barely making money XXX tariffs XXXX their wall. believe me XXXXX huge
Kushner: Ok, I’ll look into it, but I highly recommend that you drop your idea of having your name in neon lights on every other section of the wall, especially the side that faces Mexico.
Trump: XXXXX (incomprehensible) XXXX huge. Any way we can get Mexicans to pray at my wall like your people pray at the Western wall? XXXX (incomprehensible) XXXXX huge XXXXX Trump XXXXX biggest ever XXX they love me.
Kushner: Oy vey.
Partially recovered transcript:
Kushner: We’ve got a problem. I think he’s gone off the reservation again.
Putin: Focus. You need to get him to focus. I’m not paying you for these distractions.
Kushner: He wants his name on the wall, all over it. And he wants to sell naming rights to sections of it.
Putin: Jared, you are starting to piss me off. I told you XXXXX (incomprehensible). If I knew I would have to deal with this XXXX (incomprehensible) I would have chosen Hilary.
Kushner: Listen, I’ll bring him down from this. I talked him out of nuking North Korea, didn’t I?
Putin: I’m not so sure that was a good idea. Listen, I need you to XXXXX or else I’ll XXXXX and that will be the end of XXXXXX
Kushner: I hear you. I’ll deal with it.
As I type this, my team of white hat hackers at Harbor Labs is working on deciphering the missing sections. We have about 200 megabytes of communications, and some of it is very revealing. I’m beginning to suspect that our current administration does not have the country’s best interests at heart.
Among the revelations we have uncovered so far are the following:
· After helping Putin finance a social media campaign to stir up Brexit fever in the UK, Trump wanted to try to get California to vote to leave the United States, but Jared talked him out of it.
· Jared also convinced Trump not to appoint Stormy Daniels to the Supreme Court, but they both agreed to stick with the theme of a party animal for the position.
· Ivanka messages Jared about 35 times per day. They love sending each other heart emojis.
Hold on, I’m getting a message from Julian Assange ... Oh man, he wants the WhatsApp messages. How did he even find out about my hack? Is he reading my emails as I compose them? I never liked that guy. This is crazy!
Okay, so I have to go figure out what I’m going to do with all of this. Maybe I’ll release all the deciphered messages right before the next election. Nah, I better not. I wouldn’t want to turn it into a circus.
Happy April Fools Day!
