10 ms·

Contrary to public claims, Apple can read your iMessages

144 points by shawndumas 13y ago

anfedorov 13y ago
[The researchers] went on to say there's no technical measure stopping Apple employees, working under a secret court order or otherwise, from performing the same kind of attack and making it completely transparent to the parties exchanging iMessages. Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties. We have evidence of a secret court order for Verizon to hand over the meta-data associated with phone calls. IANAL, but this seems quite different from ordering Apple to perform a MITM attack against a user. Under what kind of court order would Apple have to remove or compromise end-to-end encryption from a target's device?
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  The same kind of court order that told Lavabit to hand over their SSL key, one where the person of interest was communicating over iMessage. It would probably be accompanied by an NSL which would then prevent Apple from talking about it.
  - anfedorov 13y ago
    AFAIK, the Lavabit case is not legally decided yet: http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/11/lavabit-challenges-contempt-order/ I imagine Apple would put up quite a strong legal fight if they were issued the same order, especially considering their public stance. A NSL can force Apple to not disclose it, but they can't force them to publically lie about it. And lying about that would be ridiculously stupid.
    - privong 13y ago
      > A NSL can force Apple to not disclose it, but they can't force them to publically lie about it. And lying about that would be ridiculously stupid. I'm not sure they'd be put in a position to lie. It would have to be a very direct, specific question to _require_ a lie. Otherwise, dodgy language would suffice.
      - anfedorov 13y ago
        They didn't use dodgy language: "conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data." [1]. 1. https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/ https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/
        fpgeek 13y ago
        Suppose Apple made the broad, unequivocal claim before they got an iMessage-related NSL. While the NSL can't compel Apple to lie, would Apple choose tone down their language afterwards?
        privong 13y ago
        I meant using dodgy langugage in future statements. They may not have received a NSL yet, so one doesn't know if their strong language could poentially be tempered by a NSL. I don't think one can conclusively argue this point either way.
        ChuckMcM 13y ago
        And per the article, that statement can be true at the same time this statement can be true: "Apple can intercept the creation of new conversations between users on iMessage or FaceTime if compelled to do so by a valid court order." English being as fungible as it is, leads to this sort of mess.
    - ChuckMcM 13y ago
      You also misunderstand a bit what happened in Lavabits case (easy to do I know). Basically the government got a court order for one of Lavabits user's email [1]. Lavabits responded they couldn't decrypt the email because they don't have the key. Government responded, ok, give us your SSL key so we can decrypt any traffic we may or may not have between you and your users. They stalled but eventually complied [2]. Court further forced them to give them the key in digital form, which they also did. And then shut down to prevent the Government's possession of that key to give them new data from their users. There wasn't a "case" here, Lavabit was compelled and risked fines, jail time, or both if they did not comply. You get a legal court order you can challenge it in court, but when the court upholds the legality of the order (as it did here) you either comply or go to jail. Apple will comply with any legal court order (although they may object to it first, as Google has done according to court records). [1] Presumed to be Snowden. [2] Printed out in 4pt font (which I thought was brilliant btw)
- StavrosK 13y ago
  A subpoena? I'm not aware of the protocol, but it may be that Apple could only do this the first time someone sent a message, when keys were established. It might not, I'm just speculating, but it sounds reasonable. If Apple wanted the protocol to be insecure, they'd have just sent messages in plaintext over TLS and be done with it. The fact that Apple actively designed a reasonably secure, encrypted protocol is evidence that they wanted to protect users against themselves too (to the point where it didn't impact usability).
  - otterley 13y ago
    If a subpoena were used for this purpose I'd be quite surprised. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure only allows subpoenas to issue for the following: 1. Compel a witness to testify; 2. Compel someone to produce a document or "tangible thing"; 3. Require someone to allow the inspection of premises. Fed. R. Civ. Proc. Rule 45(a)(1)(A)(iii). I can't imagine the Government would attempt to use subpoena power to force a business to take any other action, and if they tried to do so, as an attorney I would definitely appeal it (and probably prevail). That's not to say there aren't other means at the Government's disposal, but subpoena is definitely not one of them.
- Steko 13y ago
  Hasn't there been some discussion that law enforcement sends phones to apple to decrypt messages and the whole thing takes forever because Apple needs to apply some amount of brute force to it?
- Spooky23 13y ago
  The police will make this sort of request for subjects of criminal investigations. It's a specific process, governed by the courts and warrants -- I believe it's called a pen register. Whenever a new technology comes out without lawful intercept, it gets embraced by criminals. Remember Nextel/Boost phones with direct connect? You might recall that there were 3 resellers on a block in the hood selling these things in the early 2000's. DirectConnect wasn't tappable for a few years, and the addressing scheme was tied to a phone, not a user. Those users later moved to BlackBerry.
StavrosK 13y ago
This says that, yes, Apple can read your iMessages, but it seems to me that the protocol is pretty much designed to be as secure as one can make it while still being usable. Would you really expect people who used iMessage to call their friends and have them read hex fingerprints over the phone? As anti-Apple as I am, I think we have to give them this one, especially when the alternative (i.e. making iMessage completely unencrypted) would have been much, much easier.
- GrinningFool 13y ago
  Well - to be fair, BBM over BES is as secure as it gets. The only people who can read those messages are sender and recipient, and the owner of the org keys. Neither cell provider nor blackberry can decrypt them.
  - privong 13y ago
    I think it's established that there are backdoors in BBM. E.g., http://www.zdnet.com/in/indias-blackberry-monitoring-system-ready-for-use-7000017937/ http://www.zdnet.com/in/indias-blackberry-monitoring-system-...
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    How does it exchange the keys? If you don't verify fingerprints, there's always the possibility of a MITM.
    - shasta 13y ago
      You can arrange a chat protocol, I think, where MITM isn't possible without being easily detectable in a low latency environment. The idea would be that when you see the "..." of the other person typing, you're receiving an encrypted copy of the letters of their message. When the message comes through it contains information needed to decrypt the message that was received over many seconds. You could always be chatting with an imposter, but a middle man would have to wait for the decrypted message before sending out the re-encrypted keys, which would add a big awkward pause before every response even started being typed.
Steko 13y ago
Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties. Well internal controls could prevent that but since we don't know we'll assume they don't exist, print the headline: Tim Cook is reading your iMessages right now!
- mcherm 13y ago
  Well, being prevented by internal controls is outside the scope of the question. Apple had claimed that they were incapable of intercepting the messages, not that they had policies against it. And Apple is known to be subject to secret US government demands that come with a gag order.
  - Steko 13y ago
    "being prevented by internal controls is outside the scope of the question" /shrug, when Gabriel W. says no one at Duck Duck Go can read your search history he's making a claim based entirely on internal controls that DDG has established that make this impossible. Similarly, Apple didn't claim it would be impossible for them to ever <rewrite everything> and one day be able to read your iMessages.
  - stephen_g 13y ago
    They said that they couldn't read iMessages as it is. One would think it was pretty obvious that they could change the system to be able to read them.
  - mattdmrs 13y ago
    What we know is that it seems possible, when looking at the system externally, for them to perform MITM attacks. What we don't know is if their system internally makes it possible for anyone inside apple to intercept and read those messages, with or without an order from the NSA. They could very well have told us the truth!
    - mcherm 13y ago
pa5tabear 13y ago
Does that mean they can view private pictures sent via iMessage? I've wondered the same thing about Dropbox. If I were to open my dropbox at work, could my employer view private things in the dropbox? Even if I don't open the file, an icon will still load in the browser view.
- pmjordan 13y ago
  If I were to open my dropbox at work, could my employer view private things in the dropbox? If your employer has physical access or the admin password to your work computer (very likely) then anything you store or do on it is potentially compromised. (including passwords, keys, etc.) Same for work-issued phones etc. The security of the protocol is irrelevant in this case as you're trusting a compromised client.
- roywiggins 13y ago
  Your employer could MITM all your SSL connections just by installing their own cert installed on the machine, so yeah.
  - fpgeek 13y ago
    Indeed. This is why Apple sending your AppleID and password in the clear inside the SSL connection to Apple is troubling. That makes it relatively easy for the right IT people to steal those credentials. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.
kemayo 13y ago
This reads more like "Apple can't read your messages as-is, but controls all the iMessage key-exchange infrastructure, and thus could sabotage it if it chose to".
coldcode 13y ago
Is there any commercially viable messaging protocol that is 100% defensible against any and all attacks?
- StavrosK 13y ago
  No, nothing is defensible against all attacks. OTR, Silent Phone/Text, (I'm forgetting some here), GPG/PGP, they're all good enough if you verify the fingerprints.
- leeoniya 13y ago
  i dont see how something like this could conceivably work for 2 parties that do not yet know each other. the problem of establishing identity/trust between strangers can't be solved in any 100% manner over any medium that can be tampered with. if both of you rely on some intermediate authority for authentication (as HTTPS works), it's by definition not 100% because the intermediary can, in theory, be compromised. if the two parties know each other and can authenticate via some basic questions, that may work. or you can just exchange symmetric AES keys in person or public certs through another channel.
  - eknkc 13y ago
    How about physical trust creation protocol? Something like bumping phones to create key pairs and exchanging them via bluetooth. That might work fine in theory.
mcherm 13y ago
This seems a bit disingenuous to me. If I understand it correctly, they are saying that the messages are encrypted using an RSA key unique to the sender, and that this is not secure because Apple could, if they wanted to or were ordered to, replace the certificates with ones that were not secret: > Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties. What is misleading here is that (if I understand it correctly) the cryptography is solid, it is the implementation being owned by Apple that raises the doubt. But this is NOT a statement about the cryptography used on the iMessages, it is a statement about the fact that Apple effectively has "root access" to their phones. Imagine that you had a PERFECT and UNBREAKABLE code system. Perhaps it interfaces with angles who alter the laws of the universe to prevent anyone but the intended recipient from reading the messages. Such a system would still have the same vulnerability. All Apple needs to do is to alter the phone so that when you click on the icon to launch this perfectly secure messaging app it instead launches one that has the same UI but which actually sends a duplicate to the NSA (or whoever it is you don't want listening in). ANY system where code can be deployed at will and the owner of the device is not in full control of the device will have this same level of vulnerability. Saying that a system is insecure because you could change the system doesn't tell you anything interesting about the system.
- numbsafari 13y ago
  And so the challenge is similar to the TOR challenge, in a sense. If you want real security it requires a certain amount of inconvenience (such having to use an OS and a device for which you can verify it is doing what you think it is, or using a protocol that slows down your already slow internet connection) and because inconvenience is not popular this means using a tool that only people who are "afraid of being caught doing something" would want to use. In a sense, you are an instant target for suspicion, you have created a "reasonable and probably cause for suspicion" by using such a device or software system. I remember driving through my neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia and seeing a young man walking down the side of the road and being shocked by this act. Nobody walks in that neighborhood or along that road. Nobody bikes there. Frankly, it's ill advised because of the winding nature of the road and the absence of sidewalks or even a shoulder. I could feel myself become immediately suspicious of his presence and his actions. All he was doing was going out for a walk. Frankly, I was the weird one. At some point, as technology becomes embedded in our culture we expect people to use it and we look at those who do not as odd balls and are suspicious of them (think the Amish). So if you are avoiding using the "latest and greatest" and opting to use a "secure system", people are going to look at you like you are crazy and be suspicious of your activities. This will probably drive you to keep it secret, which will only make it look more incriminating. My point is: how do make these things mainstream in such a way that ordinary people who aren't interested in the security aspects can and will use them, but those who want or need the added security can use them without garnering suspicion for doing so?
WaterSponge 13y ago
Did anyone ever figure out how the iMessage for Android developer got his implementation to work?...
- tuananh 13y ago
  saurik said this on Twitter[1] > A 3rd-party iMessage app was just released on Android; I believe all data sent from/to Apple is resent to/from China for processing: beware. [1]https://twitter.com/saurik/status/382387551144652800 https://twitter.com/saurik/status/382387551144652800
- tedunangst 13y ago
  Imagine a giant cluster of VMs running desktop iMessage. Imagine the android client is actually a VNC client connecting to one of the VMs and screen scraping it. Sprinkle with magic dust and UI polish.
stellar678 13y ago
So if I get this right, the vulnerability is that Apple could sit in between you and your friend, impersonating each to the other while relaying and reading your messages. This seems about as vulnerable as the certificate authority/public key infrastructure system used for SSL, code signing, etc... We're always delegating to another party the responsibility of authenticating the person on the other side of our messages/web browser/signed software that we run. In the case of iMessage, Apple is responsible for authenticating your friend. In the SSL or signed code case, the certificate authorities are responsible. Seems that both Apple and CA companies might be subject to the same legal pressures to eavesdrop on people.
- fsckin 13y ago
  Not quite. A CA signs your public key. You never give anyone the private key, because... well, it's private.
  - agwa 13y ago
    You're not giving anyone your private key here, either. stellar678 is basically correct - Apple, like a CA, is vouching for the authenticity of users' public keys. The only difference is superficial: a SSL CA signs a certificate and the validation is done without needing to contact the CA, whereas with iChat the public key is validated by virtue of coming from Apple. Just as a CA can sign a malicious certificate, Apple can send you a malicious public key.
    - hrjet 13y ago
      I wouldn't call that a superficial difference. Sending a malicious public key from a central server is easier than injecting a public key into a network stream. The former requires just a single entity to be compromised. The latter requires a compromise in the network in addition to a compromise in the CA.
    - fsckin 13y ago
      Except in the iMessage scenario, Apple generates (and keeps) a copy of the private key so you can recover a lost device by signing into iCloud on a new phone.
nick32m 13y ago
I don't mind apple is able to it... as long as not the chinese government ..
- tonyplee 13y ago
  Most likely, the chinese government can/does tell Apple to decrypt certain msg or don't do biz in China, similar to what India government told RIM.
_Simon 13y ago
Article's author is Dan Goodin. I'd take everything he says with a quarry full of salt. This guy is symptomatic of all that is wrong with Ars these days.

144 points by shawndumas 13y ago

[The researchers] went on to say there's no technical measure stopping Apple employees, working under a secret court order or otherwise, from performing the same kind of attack and making it completely transparent to the parties exchanging iMessages. Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties. We have evidence of a secret court order for Verizon to hand over the meta-data associated with phone calls. IANAL, but this seems quite different from ordering Apple to perform a MITM attack against a user. Under what kind of court order would Apple have to remove or compromise end-to-end encryption from a target's device?

ChuckMcM 13y ago
The same kind of court order that told Lavabit to hand over their SSL key, one where the person of interest was communicating over iMessage. It would probably be accompanied by an NSL which would then prevent Apple from talking about it.
- anfedorov 13y ago
  AFAIK, the Lavabit case is not legally decided yet: http://www.volokh.com/2013/10/11/lavabit-challenges-contempt-order/ I imagine Apple would put up quite a strong legal fight if they were issued the same order, especially considering their public stance. A NSL can force Apple to not disclose it, but they can't force them to publically lie about it. And lying about that would be ridiculously stupid.
  - privong 13y ago
    > A NSL can force Apple to not disclose it, but they can't force them to publically lie about it. And lying about that would be ridiculously stupid. I'm not sure they'd be put in a position to lie. It would have to be a very direct, specific question to _require_ a lie. Otherwise, dodgy language would suffice.
    - anfedorov 13y ago
      They didn't use dodgy language: "conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data." [1]. 1. https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/ https://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/
      - fpgeek 13y ago
        Suppose Apple made the broad, unequivocal claim before they got an iMessage-related NSL. While the NSL can't compel Apple to lie, would Apple choose tone down their language afterwards?
      - privong 13y ago
        I meant using dodgy langugage in future statements. They may not have received a NSL yet, so one doesn't know if their strong language could poentially be tempered by a NSL. I don't think one can conclusively argue this point either way.
      - ChuckMcM 13y ago
        And per the article, that statement can be true at the same time this statement can be true: "Apple can intercept the creation of new conversations between users on iMessage or FaceTime if compelled to do so by a valid court order." English being as fungible as it is, leads to this sort of mess.
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    You also misunderstand a bit what happened in Lavabits case (easy to do I know). Basically the government got a court order for one of Lavabits user's email [1]. Lavabits responded they couldn't decrypt the email because they don't have the key. Government responded, ok, give us your SSL key so we can decrypt any traffic we may or may not have between you and your users. They stalled but eventually complied [2]. Court further forced them to give them the key in digital form, which they also did. And then shut down to prevent the Government's possession of that key to give them new data from their users. There wasn't a "case" here, Lavabit was compelled and risked fines, jail time, or both if they did not comply. You get a legal court order you can challenge it in court, but when the court upholds the legality of the order (as it did here) you either comply or go to jail. Apple will comply with any legal court order (although they may object to it first, as Google has done according to court records). [1] Presumed to be Snowden. [2] Printed out in 4pt font (which I thought was brilliant btw)
StavrosK 13y ago
A subpoena? I'm not aware of the protocol, but it may be that Apple could only do this the first time someone sent a message, when keys were established. It might not, I'm just speculating, but it sounds reasonable. If Apple wanted the protocol to be insecure, they'd have just sent messages in plaintext over TLS and be done with it. The fact that Apple actively designed a reasonably secure, encrypted protocol is evidence that they wanted to protect users against themselves too (to the point where it didn't impact usability).
- otterley 13y ago
  If a subpoena were used for this purpose I'd be quite surprised. The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure only allows subpoenas to issue for the following: 1. Compel a witness to testify; 2. Compel someone to produce a document or "tangible thing"; 3. Require someone to allow the inspection of premises. Fed. R. Civ. Proc. Rule 45(a)(1)(A)(iii). I can't imagine the Government would attempt to use subpoena power to force a business to take any other action, and if they tried to do so, as an attorney I would definitely appeal it (and probably prevail). That's not to say there aren't other means at the Government's disposal, but subpoena is definitely not one of them.
Steko 13y ago
Hasn't there been some discussion that law enforcement sends phones to apple to decrypt messages and the whole thing takes forever because Apple needs to apply some amount of brute force to it?
Spooky23 13y ago
The police will make this sort of request for subjects of criminal investigations. It's a specific process, governed by the courts and warrants -- I believe it's called a pen register. Whenever a new technology comes out without lawful intercept, it gets embraced by criminals. Remember Nextel/Boost phones with direct connect? You might recall that there were 3 resellers on a block in the hood selling these things in the early 2000's. DirectConnect wasn't tappable for a few years, and the addressing scheme was tied to a phone, not a user. Those users later moved to BlackBerry.

StavrosK 13y ago

This says that, yes, Apple can read your iMessages, but it seems to me that the protocol is pretty much designed to be as secure as one can make it while still being usable. Would you really expect people who used iMessage to call their friends and have them read hex fingerprints over the phone? As anti-Apple as I am, I think we have to give them this one, especially when the alternative (i.e. making iMessage completely unencrypted) would have been much, much easier.

GrinningFool 13y ago
Well - to be fair, BBM over BES is as secure as it gets. The only people who can read those messages are sender and recipient, and the owner of the org keys. Neither cell provider nor blackberry can decrypt them.
- privong 13y ago
  I think it's established that there are backdoors in BBM. E.g., http://www.zdnet.com/in/indias-blackberry-monitoring-system-ready-for-use-7000017937/ http://www.zdnet.com/in/indias-blackberry-monitoring-system-...
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- StavrosK 13y ago
  How does it exchange the keys? If you don't verify fingerprints, there's always the possibility of a MITM.
  - shasta 13y ago
    You can arrange a chat protocol, I think, where MITM isn't possible without being easily detectable in a low latency environment. The idea would be that when you see the "..." of the other person typing, you're receiving an encrypted copy of the letters of their message. When the message comes through it contains information needed to decrypt the message that was received over many seconds. You could always be chatting with an imposter, but a middle man would have to wait for the decrypted message before sending out the re-encrypted keys, which would add a big awkward pause before every response even started being typed.

Steko 13y ago

Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties. Well internal controls could prevent that but since we don't know we'll assume they don't exist, print the headline: Tim Cook is reading your iMessages right now!

mcherm 13y ago
Well, being prevented by internal controls is outside the scope of the question. Apple had claimed that they were incapable of intercepting the messages, not that they had policies against it. And Apple is known to be subject to secret US government demands that come with a gag order.
- Steko 13y ago
  "being prevented by internal controls is outside the scope of the question" /shrug, when Gabriel W. says no one at Duck Duck Go can read your search history he's making a claim based entirely on internal controls that DDG has established that make this impossible. Similarly, Apple didn't claim it would be impossible for them to ever <rewrite everything> and one day be able to read your iMessages.
- stephen_g 13y ago
  They said that they couldn't read iMessages as it is. One would think it was pretty obvious that they could change the system to be able to read them.
- mattdmrs 13y ago
  What we know is that it seems possible, when looking at the system externally, for them to perform MITM attacks. What we don't know is if their system internally makes it possible for anyone inside apple to intercept and read those messages, with or without an order from the NSA. They could very well have told us the truth!
  - mcherm 13y ago

pa5tabear 13y ago

Does that mean they can view private pictures sent via iMessage? I've wondered the same thing about Dropbox. If I were to open my dropbox at work, could my employer view private things in the dropbox? Even if I don't open the file, an icon will still load in the browser view.

pmjordan 13y ago
If I were to open my dropbox at work, could my employer view private things in the dropbox? If your employer has physical access or the admin password to your work computer (very likely) then anything you store or do on it is potentially compromised. (including passwords, keys, etc.) Same for work-issued phones etc. The security of the protocol is irrelevant in this case as you're trusting a compromised client.
roywiggins 13y ago
Your employer could MITM all your SSL connections just by installing their own cert installed on the machine, so yeah.
- fpgeek 13y ago
  Indeed. This is why Apple sending your AppleID and password in the clear inside the SSL connection to Apple is troubling. That makes it relatively easy for the right IT people to steal those credentials. Hopefully this will be fixed soon.

kemayo 13y ago

This reads more like "Apple can't read your messages as-is, but controls all the iMessage key-exchange infrastructure, and thus could sabotage it if it chose to".

coldcode 13y ago

Is there any commercially viable messaging protocol that is 100% defensible against any and all attacks?

StavrosK 13y ago
No, nothing is defensible against all attacks. OTR, Silent Phone/Text, (I'm forgetting some here), GPG/PGP, they're all good enough if you verify the fingerprints.
leeoniya 13y ago
i dont see how something like this could conceivably work for 2 parties that do not yet know each other. the problem of establishing identity/trust between strangers can't be solved in any 100% manner over any medium that can be tampered with. if both of you rely on some intermediate authority for authentication (as HTTPS works), it's by definition not 100% because the intermediary can, in theory, be compromised. if the two parties know each other and can authenticate via some basic questions, that may work. or you can just exchange symmetric AES keys in person or public certs through another channel.
- eknkc 13y ago
  How about physical trust creation protocol? Something like bumping phones to create key pairs and exchanging them via bluetooth. That might work fine in theory.

mcherm 13y ago

This seems a bit disingenuous to me. If I understand it correctly, they are saying that the messages are encrypted using an RSA key unique to the sender, and that this is not secure because Apple could, if they wanted to or were ordered to, replace the certificates with ones that were not secret: > Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties. What is misleading here is that (if I understand it correctly) the cryptography is solid, it is the implementation being owned by Apple that raises the doubt. But this is NOT a statement about the cryptography used on the iMessages, it is a statement about the fact that Apple effectively has "root access" to their phones. Imagine that you had a PERFECT and UNBREAKABLE code system. Perhaps it interfaces with angles who alter the laws of the universe to prevent anyone but the intended recipient from reading the messages. Such a system would still have the same vulnerability. All Apple needs to do is to alter the phone so that when you click on the icon to launch this perfectly secure messaging app it instead launches one that has the same UI but which actually sends a duplicate to the NSA (or whoever it is you don't want listening in). ANY system where code can be deployed at will and the owner of the device is not in full control of the device will have this same level of vulnerability. Saying that a system is insecure because you could change the system doesn't tell you anything interesting about the system.

numbsafari 13y ago
And so the challenge is similar to the TOR challenge, in a sense. If you want real security it requires a certain amount of inconvenience (such having to use an OS and a device for which you can verify it is doing what you think it is, or using a protocol that slows down your already slow internet connection) and because inconvenience is not popular this means using a tool that only people who are "afraid of being caught doing something" would want to use. In a sense, you are an instant target for suspicion, you have created a "reasonable and probably cause for suspicion" by using such a device or software system. I remember driving through my neighborhood in suburban Philadelphia and seeing a young man walking down the side of the road and being shocked by this act. Nobody walks in that neighborhood or along that road. Nobody bikes there. Frankly, it's ill advised because of the winding nature of the road and the absence of sidewalks or even a shoulder. I could feel myself become immediately suspicious of his presence and his actions. All he was doing was going out for a walk. Frankly, I was the weird one. At some point, as technology becomes embedded in our culture we expect people to use it and we look at those who do not as odd balls and are suspicious of them (think the Amish). So if you are avoiding using the "latest and greatest" and opting to use a "secure system", people are going to look at you like you are crazy and be suspicious of your activities. This will probably drive you to keep it secret, which will only make it look more incriminating. My point is: how do make these things mainstream in such a way that ordinary people who aren't interested in the security aspects can and will use them, but those who want or need the added security can use them without garnering suspicion for doing so?

WaterSponge 13y ago

Did anyone ever figure out how the iMessage for Android developer got his implementation to work?...

tuananh 13y ago
saurik said this on Twitter[1] > A 3rd-party iMessage app was just released on Android; I believe all data sent from/to Apple is resent to/from China for processing: beware. [1]https://twitter.com/saurik/status/382387551144652800 https://twitter.com/saurik/status/382387551144652800
tedunangst 13y ago
Imagine a giant cluster of VMs running desktop iMessage. Imagine the android client is actually a VNC client connecting to one of the VMs and screen scraping it. Sprinkle with magic dust and UI polish.

stellar678 13y ago

So if I get this right, the vulnerability is that Apple could sit in between you and your friend, impersonating each to the other while relaying and reading your messages. This seems about as vulnerable as the certificate authority/public key infrastructure system used for SSL, code signing, etc... We're always delegating to another party the responsibility of authenticating the person on the other side of our messages/web browser/signed software that we run. In the case of iMessage, Apple is responsible for authenticating your friend. In the SSL or signed code case, the certificate authorities are responsible. Seems that both Apple and CA companies might be subject to the same legal pressures to eavesdrop on people.

fsckin 13y ago
Not quite. A CA signs your public key. You never give anyone the private key, because... well, it's private.
- agwa 13y ago
  You're not giving anyone your private key here, either. stellar678 is basically correct - Apple, like a CA, is vouching for the authenticity of users' public keys. The only difference is superficial: a SSL CA signs a certificate and the validation is done without needing to contact the CA, whereas with iChat the public key is validated by virtue of coming from Apple. Just as a CA can sign a malicious certificate, Apple can send you a malicious public key.
  - hrjet 13y ago
    I wouldn't call that a superficial difference. Sending a malicious public key from a central server is easier than injecting a public key into a network stream. The former requires just a single entity to be compromised. The latter requires a compromise in the network in addition to a compromise in the CA.
  - fsckin 13y ago
    Except in the iMessage scenario, Apple generates (and keeps) a copy of the private key so you can recover a lost device by signing into iCloud on a new phone.

nick32m 13y ago

I don't mind apple is able to it... as long as not the chinese government ..

tonyplee 13y ago
Most likely, the chinese government can/does tell Apple to decrypt certain msg or don't do biz in China, similar to what India government told RIM.

_Simon 13y ago

Article's author is Dan Goodin. I'd take everything he says with a quarry full of salt. This guy is symptomatic of all that is wrong with Ars these days.