Migrate Whatsapp to Signal

Hi all,

Yesterday due to the massive amount of friends asking me if they should move to Signal after the enforce new WhatsApp Policy and after obviously advising them that in terms of privacy it has been the right move for years.

One of them ask me if they could export their conversations (after reading the Policy I was unable to find anything referring specifically to this topic but I am no lawyer so in my mind so far is a grey area legally speaking). I answered that so far it was not possible to my friend but during my little sleep night my hacker mind was bothering me with obviously it is possible ( Since you own the key for the AES encryption is easy to get the conversations from the backups files but the difficult part would be to create a new file as a Signal backup that could not just read but allocate the information in the right order. Signal been focused in security I don’t imagine an smooth profiling but it could be that they share more in common that one can expect with this information even when the number of some of your friends are not in signal yet it would allow you to erase the WhatsApp waiting for them to join you at the other side of moon.

Knowing that this is far from my areas of expertise or capabilities as one man project I set my self to write this message to see if someone could guide me or provide their input and opinions. I am willing to dedicate some time to the project if more people are interested and can contribute.

Anyways I reach to you since I believe is possible but not particular easy…maybe it could easier than we think.

I will be making more research and posting my findings here.

Step 1
Starting our journey lets see where the rabbit hole take us…shall we?

Google Drive
Here I found a python 3.x scrip from techpanther to extract all the chat or media backup from your google drive account.
For Local Backup
In case you have WhatsApp Backups in your local phone storage you can just look for WhatsApp folder in the internal memory of your phone and transfer a copy to your pc.

Step 2

We will decrypt the chats so far I found this method that works with non rooted android phones Adroid 4.0 up to Android 7.0.

For this we will need
Java: https://www.java.com/pt_BR/download/
Drivers ADB: https://adb.clockworkmod.com/
Script by EliteAndroidApps: WhatsApp-Key-DB-Extractor
CHAT Visualizer by andreas-mausch: whatsapp-viewer
Then just translate this by limontec(https://www.limontec.com/2020/02/extract-chat-whatsapp-android-no-root.html ) and follow steps.

Step 3 will be to extract and decrypt signal back up DB

Step 4 Will be to compare both DBs and probably create a script that format WhatsApp backup to signal backup format so that messages are in a chronological order.

Step 5 Will be to run the backup on signal pray

well from there we probably will need to debug and probably crash the app a few 100 of times until we get it right or perhaps been signal a non profit org contact them asking for some help.

I will try tomorrow to move to step 3 and 4 maybe some warriors join me and I wake up with a solution for those steps.

For step 3, you can use this https://github.com/xeals/signal-back 8
Haven’t tested it, but I hope it works.