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Without whatsapp being open source, how do we know for sure that Facebook is not somehow storing or reading our messages? As good as this sounds on paper, I he
by nnnnnn 11y ago
Without whatsapp being open source, how do we know for sure that Facebook is not somehow storing or reading our messages?
As good as this sounds on paper, I hesitate to trust Facebook to transmit my data without wanting to peek a bit. I currently use both Whatsapp and Signal and will probably continue to do the same unless there is a way for users to verify Facebook doesn't keep a copy.
- tptacek 11y agoClosed source software isn't impenetrable. The idea that you need source code to evaluate security claims is mostly a meme from the 1990s.
- jamesdwilson 11y agohow's that boot taste?
- dang 11y agoI realize you've gotten hammered by downvotes already, but this comment crosses the additional (and much worse) line of personal attack. Please don't do that on HN, regardless of who you're disagreeing with or how wrong they may be.
- wyager 11y agoYou don't need the source, but it makes it a hell of a lot easier.
- tptacek 11y agoOnly if builds are fully reproducible, which is rarely true. Otherwise, the source can make it harder, by lying to you.
- kbwt 11y agoThen demand reproducible builds from software with security claims?
- tptacek 11y agoCan I have serious cryptanalytic audits first? Because virtually nothing has that. At least I trust what Signal Protocol is trying to do!
- kbwt 11y agoOne does not preclude the other. For instance, the current Signal implementation is almost certainly prone to remote code execution. How does the Signal project handle reports of potential vulnerabilities? I haven't seen any security contact information on the OpenWhisperSystems site.
- wyager 11y agoDon't tell me that it's easier to RE an entire multi-megabyte messenger app than it is to real the source code. Assembly can lie to you as well. There are all sorts of ways to trick IDA and friends.
- dest 11y agoTaking the example of Skype, the hardening/on-the-fly decryption techniques used in the binary made the reverse engineering very difficult [0]. Difficult to reliably audit such software. Don't know about Whatsapp though. [0] http://www.oklabs.net/skype-reverse-engineering-the-long-journey/ http://www.oklabs.net/skype-reverse-engineering-the-long-jou...
- tptacek 11y agoThat was true in the case of Skype (which was eventually reversed), but it is not true here.
- dest 11y agoMaybe it is feasible, but at the very least I would wait for someone to reverse engineer it and publicly publish its findings. I do not have the skills to do that. Moreover, if reverse engineering is so easy, why not open-source it from the beginning?
- tptacek 11y agoIf you don't have the skills to do basic verification of a non-obfuscated binary, you don't have the skills to verify an encrypted messaging protocol implementation from source either: the latter task is harder than the former! I think the misconception some people here have about the necessity of source code is born out of the idea that a cryptographic backdoor would look something like a mysterious HTTP POST of your key or plaintext to some random endpoint (that POST, by the way, would be trivial to spot in the binary; you wouldn't even need to read assembly). But real cryptographic backdoors can be extremely difficult to spot. A cryptographic algorithm that uses signatures, for instance, can be fatally compromised by breaking signatures (see: TLS). An injected cryptographic flaw that breaks signatures can be as simple as biasing a single-digit number of bits in a nonce; a bias can be as subtle as generating one less byte of randomness than the protocol requires.
- codys 11y ago