[Software]Clubhouse will improve its security after Chinese espionage suspicions

[SougarLord]

Although Clubhouse has barely managed to take off in Spain and other countries, its boom in po[CENSORED]rity has caused the application to already have some enemies. The main one has been China, which has already blocked the application in the country for fear that citizens have conversations outside the Government. The suspicions of the developers go further, and they believe that Clubhouse is being spied on.

 

According to The Verge, Clubhouse would have detected vulnerabilities in its infrastructure through the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO for its acronym in Internet). Vulnerabilities that could be exploited to carry out punctures and transmit information to the Chinese Government.

 

According to the SIO, the company behind the back-end infrastructure of Clubhouse Agora could cause these leaks to the Chinese Government, and therefore from the application they plan to add additional encryption to prevent the information from passing to the Chinese servers.

 

Suspicions of espionage

 

The WIS discovered that Clubhouse identification numbers or IDs (not user names) as well as chat room IDs are transmitted in plain text, that is, in clean text files that can give Agora the ability to access raw audio from Clunhouse. This implies that anyone who conscientiously monitors Internet traffic could match these IDs to see who is talking to whom and with whom.

 

The researchers discovered that they found metadata from a Clubhouse room being transmitted to servers that we believe are hosted in the People's Republic of China. "They discovered that the audio was being sent" to servers managed by Chinese entities and distributed around the world. "Agora Furthermore, it is a Chinese company so it could be legally obliged to help the Government locate and store audio messages if so required by officials of the regime.

 

Of course, Agora has specified that it does not store user metadata or the audios that are shared in the Clubhouse, beyond what it saves to check the quality of the network and bill its clients. Audio stored on servers in the United States, says Agora, is inaccessible to China.

 

The company "does not have access, share or store personally identifiable data of end users," a spokesperson said, adding that "voice or video traffic from users outside of China, including Americans, never passes through China."