4 ms·

Why did you not mention that the WhatsApp apk, even on non-google play installed devices, loads google tag manager's scripts? It is reproducibly loaded in each

Why did you not mention that the WhatsApp apk, even on non-google play installed devices, loads google tag manager's scripts? It is reproducibly loaded in each chat, and an MitM firewall can also confirm that. I don't know why the focus of audits like these are always on a specific part of the app or only about the cryptography parts, and not the overall behavior of what is leaked and transferred over the wire, and not about potential side channel or bypass attacks. Transport encryption is useless if the client copies the plaintext of the messages afterwards to another server, or say an online service for translation, you know.

tptacek 8mo ago
There's a whole section, early, in the analysis Albrecht posted that surfaces these concerns.
- cookiengineer 8mo ago
  Where in the document is that? Can you provide a page number or section title?
  - jibe 8mo ago
    ^f
afiori 8mo ago
Things like this combined with the countless ways to hide "feature flags" in a giant codebase makes me feel that anything less than "the entire app was verified + there is literally no way to dynamically load code from remote (so even no in app browser) + we checked 5 years of old versions and plan to do this for the next 5 years of update" is particularly meaningful. Still very important but my issue has never been with zucks inability to produce solid software, rather in its intentions and so them being good engineers just makes them better at hiding bad stuff.
- cookiengineer 8mo ago
  Back in the days people called skype [1] spyware because it had lots of backdoors in it and lots of undocumented APIs that shouldn't have been in there. The funny part was that skype was probably the most obfuscated binary that was ever available as "legitimate" software, so there were regular reversing events to see "how far" you could get from scratch to zeroday within 48h hackathons. Those were fun times :D [1] Skype, pre Microsoft rebrand of Lync as Skype

tptacek 8mo ago

There's a whole section, early, in the analysis Albrecht posted that surfaces these concerns.

cookiengineer 8mo ago
Where in the document is that? Can you provide a page number or section title?
- jibe 8mo ago
  ^f

afiori 8mo ago

Things like this combined with the countless ways to hide "feature flags" in a giant codebase makes me feel that anything less than "the entire app was verified + there is literally no way to dynamically load code from remote (so even no in app browser) + we checked 5 years of old versions and plan to do this for the next 5 years of update" is particularly meaningful. Still very important but my issue has never been with zucks inability to produce solid software, rather in its intentions and so them being good engineers just makes them better at hiding bad stuff.

cookiengineer 8mo ago
Back in the days people called skype [1] spyware because it had lots of backdoors in it and lots of undocumented APIs that shouldn't have been in there. The funny part was that skype was probably the most obfuscated binary that was ever available as "legitimate" software, so there were regular reversing events to see "how far" you could get from scratch to zeroday within 48h hackathons. Those were fun times :D [1] Skype, pre Microsoft rebrand of Lync as Skype