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> Apple and Google have put themselves in the middle of most notifications, causing the contents to pass through their servers, which means that they are subjec
by gruez 6mo ago
> Apple and Google have put themselves in the middle of most notifications, causing the contents to pass through their servers, which means that they are subject to all the standard warrantless wiretapping directly from governments, as well as third-party attacks on the infrastructure in place to support that monitoring.
>If you don't want end-to-end messages made available to others, set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.
This incorrect on two counts:
1. As per what you wrote immediately before the quoted text, the issue was that the OS keeps track of notifications locally. Google/Apple's notification servers have nothing to do with this
2. It's entirely possible to still have end-to-end messaging even if you're forced to send notifications through Google/Apple's servers, by encrypting data in the notification, or not including message data at all. Indeed that's what signal does. Apple or Google's never sees your message in cleartext.
- mdavidn 6mo agoYou are correct, but you omitted one complication: Clients trust Google's and Apple's servers to faithfully exchange the participants' public keys.
- soamv 6mo agoWhich clients?
- pcl 6mo agoApps (such as Signal) that care about end-to-end encryption do their own key management. So, Apple / Google servers only ever see ciphertext, and don't have access to the key material that's used for the encryption.
- toast0 6mo agoAfaik, e2e messengers don't include ciphertext with push notifications. It's an empty push to wake the client. Then the client contacts the origin to fetch the ciphertext.
- saagarjha 6mo agoThis is how it used to work; notifications can be encrypted now and Signal uses an extension to decrypt them.
- pseudalopex 6mo agoA Signal developer 12 days ago said Our FCM and APN notifications are empty and just tell the app to wake up, fetch encrypted messages, decrypt them, and then generate the notification ourselves locally.[1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47723445 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47723445
- saagarjha 6mo agoAh, yes, they would be right. I feel like I had read that someone had migrated at some point, maybe it was WhatsApp or something.
- ls612 6mo agoIsn’t that what Contact Key Verification solves? Or do I misunderstand how that works?
- qurren 6mo ago... and hold participants' private keys truly private, which you cannot verify without a rooted phone.
- microtonal 6mo agoYou don’t need a rooted phone. An open source OS with reproducible builds is enough. That way you can validate what the code does without giving up verified boot, or opening up another attack vector, etc.
- qurren 6mo ago> You don’t need a rooted phone. I disagree. 1. I need to be able to change SSL root cert, disable SSL cert pinning, and intentionally MITM installed apps and see what they are sending about me to their servers. Open source OS isn't enough if the apps aren't open source. 2. "Apps sending information about me to their motherships that I don't consent to them sending" is a MUCH bigger problem these days than people messing with SSL, so I accept the risks of (1) 3. Verified boot is big brother's dream. I want to be able to verify my own OS.
- xmx98 6mo agoSending public keys through the notification system is an unnecessary complication.
- saagarjha 6mo agoIf Signal wants to show you a notification with message text, it needs to put it on the screen through an OS service. That service was storing the plaintext on the device.
- Vinnl 6mo agoYes, but that service is running locally.
- avianlyric 6mo agoThrough an OS service yes, but not a hosted backend service. Obviously that service has store the notification in plaintext (although everything on an iPhone is encrypted at rest, but notification crypto keys have to stay in active memory for the lock screen to work), otherwise it wouldn’t be able to display the notification text. Apple support applications sending encrypted notifications, where the OS launches the app the decrypt the notification body locally and pass it back to the OS for display.
- saagarjha 6mo agoI think the idea here is that the notification text was also being put somewhere else that was not really tied to the lifetime of it being shown on screen.
- halapro 6mo agoThis thread is about Apple servers accessing the contents. Of course the OS has access to the contents of your messages, how else do you expect it to show a preview of the message? Do you want each notification to be a custom-rendered widget from the app? If the contents are that sensitive you must disable the preview. Even then, the OS has access to the pixels in your app so it really is a moot point. The caching issue here was evidently a bug.
- saagarjha 6mo agoI don't think there is anything here that I disagree with?
- totetsu 6mo agoWhat about when my notifications are showing up on my MacBook next to the phone via mirroring?
- ChadNauseam 6mo agotalking totally out of my ass, but apple seems to have robust infrastructure for e2ee communication between your devices, for example it is known that location information in find my is not visible to apple. I’d be surprised if the channel to send iphone notifications to your mac wasn’t also e2ee
- zadikian 6mo agoUnless something has changed since I last did this, the app's server initiating the apns doesn't encrypt using some public key for the destination. So no e2ee at that layer. But you could encrypt the payload and have the app decrypt it if you're managing the keys yourself.
- throw0101d 6mo ago> What about when my notifications are showing up on my MacBook next to the phone via mirroring? See perhaps §iMessage and §Continuity in Apple Platform Security: * https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-security-guide.pdf https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...
- flumes_whims_ 6mo agoThose notifications are transfered peer to peer (from your Phone to your computer) using Apple Wireless Direct Link. The contents are encrypted using AES-GCM.