4 ms·
Google, Apple, or Meta retain the power to ship a tweaked binary with a compromised RNG to a subset of users if authorities order them to be it now or in the fu
by lrvick 4y ago
Google, Apple, or Meta retain the power to ship a tweaked binary with a compromised RNG to a subset of users if authorities order them to be it now or in the future after a privacy policy change.
Proprietary encryption means users cannot verify or control the keys or the code that generates or uses the keys. The app can exfiltrate the keys or do any keyword processing on behalf of Meta as well which can include well intentioned features like forwarding paintext messages containing certain dangerous-seeming words to authorities or theoretically trusted third party review teams. Naturally they could also return -metrics- about frequency of word use back to Meta for ad targeting as well.
I too have been a champion of encryption and privacy at past companies only to have all my work undone and watch all the data become plaintext and abused for marketing by a new acquirer.
The only way end to end encryption solutions can avoid these types of abuses is when the client software is open source and can be audited, reproducibly built, and signed by any interested volunteers from the public for accountability.
Short of that it is really not that much different than TLS with promises Meta will not peek, at least not directly, today.
- Melatonic 4y agoEven with end to end encryption couldnt the app at the end also be just aggregating the data (or even transcribing audio) to send over separately?
- lrvick 4y agoYeah though this is more likely to be detected with basic network analysis. Selectively compromising the RNG seed would be much harder to detect without source code.
- beiller 4y agoIf they modified the RNG of person A's phone app during a forced stealth update, then shouldn't person B not be able to decrypt the message? Have you ever had an app update to Whatsapp that you cannot communicate with other people until you are forced to update? The alternative is that there is a vast internal conspiracy at meta that hundreds of engineers, and hundreds of ex-engineers are somehow silent on, which would be using 2 encryption keys, one that law enforcement can read, and one that the other end of the device can read. Isn't provable that Whatsapp the app is using the operating system level secure prng functions? If there was evidence of this, wouldn't it be great for a whistleblower to come out and make a killing shorting Meta's stock? Right now would be the perfect time to be kicked while they are down.
- mhio 4y ago> then shouldn't person B not be able to decrypt the message? The RNG example is a way to create keys that make it trivial for "C in the middle" with the RNG details to extract the contents. They are still valid, just not useful as keys. The Juniper attack and Dual EC exploit is a good real world example of compromising an RNG for passive decryption, although Dual EC was designed to be like that. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~hovav/dist/juniper.pdf https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~hovav/dist/juniper.pdf