> Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, according to a person familiar with the matter.
I'm equally curious what this means for Signal and any other open-source encrypted services.
In the US, ITAR could hypothetically be used to make open-sourcing of cryptographic algorithms illegal. This technique is used for robotics software that could be dual-purposed for weapons guidance.
Proteus, I am concerned too. Sometimes fiction reflects reality better than we might like, I am thinking of William Gibson’s cyber punk future distopean sci-fi.
That said, freedom can also be in our own minds, creating a good life in an ocean of political corruption and increasing control of corporations/elites. It would take more effort, but I think I could also have a good life in Gibson’s sci-fi worlds.
This case law only applies as long as the algorithm is not classified. As soon as any Original Classification Authority classifies the algorithm, it falls under a new category on the U.S. Munitions List and the government could then restrict its distribution.
Obviously, classifying something that has already been open source just makes it more difficult to use and numerous local copies will be retained, but it does make further distribution illegal.
This is the only mechanism I can think of by which the US government could kill Signal in its existing open-source form. It's ugly, but not unthinkable.
And it's misleading -- the article and the article's headline say nothing about adding a backdoor. There's not enough detail in the article to say exactly how this decision will affect WhatsApp.
(The headline on Bloomberg, "Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K. Police" is more restrained.)
On re-reading the sort article, I realize it only says they will be compelled to share "encrypted messages" and "information to support investigations". It never says anything about decrypting the messages. If that is literally all it is, then it is quite misleading.
What use would ciphertext be to GCHQ? I’m fairly certain that “encrypted messages” describes which messages they will have to provide in plaintext, not the format they will come in.
Your interpretation is likely right. But it's interesting to consider the other. Maybe they can get metadata from the ciphertext, such as size. Or maybe they are just interested in other metadata such as time. Or maybe they have some cryptographic attacks, maybe involving extracting a shared key from the peer's phone, or key injection via sim spoofing.
And worrying that a large number of readers interpretation of the article was influenced by a headline. We really have to do better and be vigilantly aware of how media and power influences public opinion, especially during times such as these.
Not the parent, but true in a sense. Communication is the act of conveying information from one person's consciousness to another. In the usual encrypted chat scenario, that path is unencrypted at two points (plaintext input, and plaintext output at the far end).
It is entirely possible though to have a true end-to-end encrypted channel if both parties are able to do the encryption in their heads without the plain text message ever being visible. A trivial practical example would be a single bit message with a single bit one time pad (agree ahead of time that if I say yes on the phone, it means no and vice versa).
Also, the article is unclear about whether the messages have to be decrypted before being shared, so they may just have to share the encrypted message.
I would expect such an accord between countries to enable data sharing, not force companies to record more data. So I'm sceptical of the article's claim for now.
(disclaimer, speculation) The Times article says this has been in progress for four years, so I suspect that this is the culmination of https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/UK-US_Bilateral_Agreem.... Which was originally planned to be encryption-neutral, but maybe things have changed in the past two years.
Given that Priti Patel is involved it probably is nothing like what's being described. She's exactly the sort of politician who thinks that mathematics can be redefined by a policy statement on TV.
> Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty between the two countries, according to a person familiar with the matter.
This sounds as if the platforms are already sharing with the US authorities. So this being about them sharing it now with UK authorities.
Historical messages, yes. However an app maker can be coerced into adding a hidden user that can participate in chats and receive all future messages decrypted. It doesn't require any special crypto hacks for that to work.
Signal may or may not be ok at the moment, but not in a couple of years (it has all the power to silently push an update with a backdoor). Among all the popular messaging apps only Telegram is in a position to not cooperate with five eyes.
Sure, but the Signal source code is open source. I've been compiling it myself for years on Android (and signing the binary with my own key). They can't silently push a binary from the Play Store and overwrite my binary.
They still can for everyone else, probably everyone you talk to over Signal, so not much of a protection. Pretty much the only way to avoid that is for Signal to give up that control, don't supply Signal directly and let others build Signal from sources and publish in independent from Signal package repositories, i.e. f-droid, OS package managers on Linux, etc. Even if they don't federate, it will at least make their end-to-end encryption sound, not useless like it is now when everyone uses Signal supplied binaries.
Whenever we talk about web encryption, people make the (valid) point that needing to trust the server to deliver the encryption mechanism greatly reduces the benefits of clientside encryption.
I agree with that analysis, but it's not clear to me why we don't have similar levels of skepticism about auto-updating desktop apps. Signal in particular uses a third-party software repository, so if it wanted to push a malicious update, it wouldn't even need to sneak it past package maintainers.
Package signing protects you against developers with bad personal security practices, because it makes it harder for a third-party to MITM their apps. But it doesn't do anything I can see to protect you from a developer that turns malicious in the future.
Unfortunately, unless things have changed since last time I tried telegram, it doesn't encrypt chats by default, which is a huge problem for any movement. OpSec is really hard, even for those who know what to do. (Operators of Silk Road 1&2 were both ha taken down by a failure in OpSec somewhere.) Security researchers have cast aspersions on MTProto the protocol used. The truly paranoid I know, for whom Signal and Telgram don't go far enough, use Wickr, which chooses to more make sacrifices in usability in favor of security, but they are few and far between.
I'm not sure if I completely agree with the silently part. Doesn't Signal have reproducible builds? In theory, any binary they release can be checked to see if it corresponds to source code.
Whether anyone is actually doing that is another question. And there is no technical reason app stores couldn't send a special backdoor-ed build to select list of users under surveillance if government forced them to. (They can target sets of users for staged roll-outs, beta programs, etc.) Which defeats the notion that one person watching can detect it for everybody.
On the other hand, it's possible to do stuff with smart phones at the platform level. Whether through vulnerabilities or some platform capability (updates, etc.), it may be possible to have a backdoor-ed binary that looks to the user like it is the regular binary. That's not a capability that Signal has, but it is a capability that might very well exist.
Regardless of all that, for users who have auto-updates enabled (most users), even if Signal can't silently push a backdoor-ed update, they can unilaterally push one. You could wake up tomorrow with a different version that has a backdoor, so even if you can identify backdoor-ed binaries, you have to turn off updates or verify the binary every time you open the app.
Assuming for a moment that we can trust our smart phones at the platform level not to lie to us, the problem of targeted backdoored builds could be mitigated somewhat if the platform implemented Binary Transparency in a clever way:
When you install an app (whether through an app store, or side-loading) the app should state the location online of an append-only log that lists all the releases (with timestamps) for that app. The phone OS could periodically check to see if an upgrade is available, and security researchers could check that the log doesn't contain references to versions which aren't available to the public.
Ideally there should perhaps also be a way for users to anonymously report which version of any app they are using, so that people with particular security concerns could configure their OS to only update an app after, for example, 50% of users have already installed the update.
> Among all the popular messaging apps only Telegram is in a position to not cooperate with five eyes.
Telegram is subject to US coercion as much as any US company: both major app stores are US-based, and without app store distribution, a product might as well be dead as far as the masses are concerned.
I didn't read that - are you sure about this? I am reading that backdoors are being asked to be created on WhatsApp. Anyway the messages aren't stored.
From the article:
Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, has previously warned that Facebook’s plan to enable users to send end-to-end encrypted messages would benefit criminals, and called on social media firms to develop “back doors” to give intelligence agencies access to their messaging platforms.
Why comment if you didn't read the article? It's in the first paragraph: "Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty"
That's the UK's position but it's not clear from the article that some kind of forced backdoor made it into the treaty, just that WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages. But they have already been sharing encrypted messages through other legal means.
If I'm reading that right, they are getting the encrypted messages, not the decrypted ones. Either whoever wrote the article doesn't know the different or the uk police have been fucked over by the us...
It's been true for a long time that since intelligence agencies aren't supposed to spy on their own citizens, they agree to spy on each other's citizens instead and subsequently share the data.
"Encrypted" could mean that's how they'll be delivered to the UK.
Or it could be a definition of the set of which messages are in question. The set is defined as the ones that users expected were supposed to be protected by encryption (or that government could not access because of encryption).
In other words, from the phrasing alone, it's not clear whether "encrypted" describes the state of the messages or the scope of the sharing.
If people in a position of power can break those laws with impunity then new laws aren't going to change that. The problem is holding the lawbreakers accountable.
It's important but you need to consider the situation where the government is corrupt. The Us is about to impeach the President; and the two factions in government are each accusing the other of corruption, albeit using wildly different criteria.
My point is that laws are only as good as the integrity of the government enforcing them, and can themselves be written in bad faith. The solution is greater participation by the public rather than only technical fixes to the legal code.
This comment is absurd. Your linked article even says:
> To be clear: the reason for this is not security. To the best of my knowledge, the Signal protocol is cryptographically sound, and your communications should still be secure. The reason has much more to do with the way the project is run, the focus and certain dependencies of the official (Android) Signal app, as well as the future of the Internet, and what future we would like to build and live in.
Beyond the author flat out saying that it’s secure- the title of the article is why they will not recommend it. It has nothing to do with it being compromised.
We are not talking about the protocol and simple one to one chats, we are talking about the app. They are several major weaknesses in Signal which have nothing to do with the protocol.
This is essentially a worrying prospect if these developments are actually implemented or advance further. The users trust in the social media service is breached if a backdoor where to be placed in their products (It also defeats the purpose of the end-to-end encryption argument). If you reside in the UK and especially in London, things have just become 500% more Orwellian.
>Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, has previously warned that Facebook’s plan to enable users to send end-to-end encrypted messages would benefit criminals...
In London alone, it is not possible to pay for public transport with cash. A debit card/oyster is required but for anonymous travel, an oyster can be topped up via cash and reduces transport surveillance, unlike using credit / debit cards. Their reasons for doing this because it "benefits criminals" is echoing the "ban encryption" nonsense.
> The U.K. and the U.S. have agreed not to investigate each other’s citizens as part of the deal...
This I don't believe.
EDIT: Use a oyster card for public anonymous transport, refrain from using a credit / debit card for this.
I live in London.It has already gone way beyond of what Orwell could have ever imagined. However,despite of all the surveillance, London is the crime capital of the world.This is probably the best place for criminals,as unless you pull a machine gun on a crowd,not much will be investigated.
I live in the UK and I feel like this is the crux of the issue. I am an active member of a sports car forum in the UK and it's terrifying how little police does in case of theft, even when the house was broken into to get the keys. If you get someone to come out and write down a report that is a miracle in itself - in 90% of cases you are just given a case number and told to speak with your insurer, nothing is ever done. I know a guy whose Range Rover was stolen, he reported it, no one came out - then few days later found it parked in a car park nearby, he rang the police to tell them that he found his stolen car, where it is, and asked if they want to come over and maybe catch whoever comes for it(or you know, maybe take fingerprints and such)? Nah, he was told that if he still has the key he can just take it, they don't have any officers to actually come out anyway. I have friends who were robbed, burgled ,and literally nothing is ever done. There is zero police on the roads around where I live, I'm actually surprised people still follow the rules of the road because realistically, the chances of ever running into a police car are somewhere around zero.
It just feels like police in the UK has been gutted to the point that unless you are literally being shot/stabbed, there is not enough resources to actually help or investigate anything. It's a shell of a functional service.
There's some evidence to suggest that more policing leads to more crime (drops in policing are correlated with a lower # of major crimes). If you're going to be hassled by police anyway, why not go large? Hence the old proverb 'might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.'
We don't necessarily need more police on the streets ( depends on the area,as always), however there's a genuine need for more,who can solve cases.I've got endless list of examples, including my own situations,where police do either nothing,because the matter is deemed not serious enough or simply don't have resources to deal with it,unless it's an attempt to murder, political threats or terrorism.
>In London alone, it is not possible to pay for public transport with cash and a card is required. Their reasons for doing this because it "benefits criminals" is echoing the "ban encryption" nonsense.
Not strictly true. You can buy an oyster card with cash, you can load it with cash and use that. After a weeks worth of journeys you can return it and get your £5 deposit back and buy another one.
Not exactly perfect but it's essentially the same as having a burner phone.
although you anonymously purchase the oyster card, you can be de-anonymized the moment you scan the card, as face recognition links you with that card.
you may slip up, or the system can always flag the id card if they're unable to make an automatic link to a card bought with cash, causing a human operator to get involved. If they see that you block your face everytime, they then can activate and access the total surveillance resources and flag the card.
Sure, but the link to an ephemeral Oyster card doesn't give them anything that the face recognition doesn't give them already. If they can track faces, then they can track journeys even if you're paying in cash directly for every ticket.
It's interesting this is even necessary -- Australia's legislation to this effect passed last year could've been used just as easily (in combination with the 5-EYES pact).
(As an aside, there was meant to be a parliamentary review of the Assistance and Access Act earlier this year -- but I haven't heard anything about it.)
Without more details I’m pretty skeptical, currently WhatsApp metadata gets turned over in warrant requests but no message content (metadata includes the times messages were sent and who they were sent from/to).
It’d be a big deal to force FB to modify WhatsApp for message content interception and I think it’d be challenged in court.
Nothing funny about the Daily Mail, it's the mouth piece of the reactionary idiots on the right (there are just as many on the left before I get tagged as a liberal) and has been for a century give or take.
This is the newspaper that had an editorial starting with "Hurrah the Blackshirts".
Other than using it as a way of keeping an eye on what some people in my society will believe (because the Mail told them to) I see zero merit in it's continued existence.
The Express and Telegraph were right facing, honest but partisan newspapers forty or fifty years ago. Now the Express is a racist comic, and since the famously and comically reclusive Barclay brothers bought it, the Telegraph is working on getting down to the Mail's level. The Mail are currently working on buying the i.
There really isn't much left on the right that you can rely on. Which is depressing considering most of our press is right leaning.
That's why I read Financial Times, however even they started leaning towards extreme left,instead of simply being a newspaper of facts with no political bias.
I fully agree with this. I know people intelligent people who used to be pretty liberal; years of reading this vile hate-rag seem to have poisened their minds.
Another reminder that there are no secure platforms; there are protocols with (one hopes) the potential to be secure. The difference becomes more important by the day.
There are more-or-less secure platforms (which are secure up until the point where you literally try to blow up a whole country up or something). It's just that (oh shocker!) a closed-source platform held by a US corporate entity, with a privacy history of Facebook no less - no that's not a good platform to assume it will be secure. There is plenty of other much more secure options.
When the article says "share users’ encrypted messages", it's not clear if it's referring to the messages in their encrypted state, or is referring to messages have been decrypted before sharing.
>WhatsApp has no ability to see the content of messages or listen to calls on WhatsApp. That’s because the encryption and decryption of messages sent on WhatsApp occurs entirely on your device. Before a message ever leaves your device, it's secured with a cryptographic lock, and only the recipient has the keys.[...]
>A search warrant issued under the procedures described in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure or equivalent state warrant procedures upon a showing of probable cause is required to compel the disclosure of the stored contents of any account, which may include "about" information, profile photos, group information and address book, if available. In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages, and undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated
Very interested to see what their response is and if their promise holds that they do not have technical access to content but merely to account information.
I’m much more interested in the wording of “in the ordinary course,” which I don’t think is just a quirk of the language and I believe it is an indication that certain differing measures can take place after being compelled to provide information.
At minimum, it seems the kind of thing a competent lawyer would require.
Even if FB / WhatsApp doesn't currently have such a capability, there's no legal guarantee they couldn't be compelled to add it, thereby putting them in conflict with language that didn't include that clause.
Afaik, case law is murky over whether creating new code qualifies as speech (illegal to compel) or facilitating legally-approved wiretapping (legal and required).
Probably not deliberately, but something can always go wrong, which is probably why they added an additional clause that messages older than 30 days should be deleted.
More interesting is what happens if someone gets a new phone. In that case (if I understood correctly) they might ask for the sender to resend the messages with a different key. If they really are forced to add a backdoor then that's where I would fit in a MITM attack, as it is limited in scale and detectable when used excessively.
Whatsapp is under the obligation to comply with lawful intercept regulation wherever they operate, just the same as any other communications platform out there. and no, Whatsapp is not some 'small indie company that just happens to not have been noticed'.
Pretending and using obfuscated language to lead the reader to believe otherwise is disingenuous.
If the source code isn't available for audit by 3rd parties (or yourself), and you can't build it from source, then it was never really "secure" anyway. What lawmakers do or don't say is just noise.
Platforms that rely on trust (in this case, trusting that FB isn't doing bad things) provide very weak guarantees about privacy/security. They could easily include a keylogger in WhatsApp and bypass the e2e encryption, for example, and us regular folk have no way of knowing.
The Whatsapp binary is sufficiently transparent to enable someone determined to write their own client. Thats enough info for an expert to verify their "messages are end to end encrypted and we don't know the key" claim.
The fly in the ointment is the client might have additional functionality to leak the e2e encryption key. That is far harder to find, but if it's use were widespread, it would be found by researchers.
The whole point is moot though - whatsapp is designed to (by default) upload cleartext chat logs to google/apple servers. Since all chats have 2+ recipients, the conversation is only safe from snooping if nobody in the chat has backup enabled, which is unlikely.
Yep, the chat log backup basically renders WhatsApp completely insecure. They also constantly nag you inside the app to enable it. This is how they caught Michael Cohen (and presumably others). Unfortunately Signal does it, too.
Yes, you're given a random password when you enable backups that you need to use when restoring. They don't get uploaded to the cloud. On iOS there's no backup feature at all AFAIK.
At least on iOS - whatsapp doesn't seem to nag about backups (i don't think i've ever enabled it), but you can do a local backup/restore if you replace handset. Signal encrypts your chats locally (but not binary blobs/video/images) but they cannot be backed up and restored locally.
Attack or cooperation with custom soft keyboard makers is much easier. It may only give you one side of the conversation but no ones seems to care if those are secure. As long as they do a good job of spell checking.
Having a 'secure' conversation definitely implies trust in Google/Apple, regardless of the Whatsapp binary behaving flawlessly (e2e encryption, solid PRNG, no logs etc.)
They could indeed serve you a different binary from the app-store. "Do you think that's Whatsapp you're using?"
Trust in the OS made by Google/Apple is slightly different from trust in the ability of Google/Apple to keep your data stored on their servers secure against nation states.
I have much more trust in the former than the latter.
FB's history suggests they have a culture of not blowing the whistle when shady things are going on.
I suspect most people want to keep their $500k+/year jobs instead of sticking their necks out. My friends who work at FAANG are largely mentally checked out, and just do it to collect their monies and retire ASAP. You can't pay rent with good feelings.
I quit my (good paying) job to burn through my savings and start my own company because I want to fix this, so it's not everyone who behaves that way :)
Look into B Corporations and read the last third of the book Lab Rats. You can make your company serve society and it's employees right without adopting shitty cultures that breeds suicides, pissing in bottles and burn outs and still make huge profits.
Fortunately for normative social theory and political economy, a lot of research has happened since Adam Smith evengalized self-interest and the free market.
The free market never has, nor never will exist. The kind of unfair distribution of scarce items to people with the most money, the creating of a competitive rather than cooperative substrate for social interaction. These things tear society apart and have always needed to be moderated whenever a market is present.
> Which part of Adam Smith are you paraphrasing exactly?
No one quote in particular; just a recurring theme.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"
- The Wealth of Nations
"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition...is so powerful, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations."
- The Wealth of Nations
"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would...assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever"
- The Wealth of Nations
"In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity [capitalists] are led by an invisible hand...and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society"
"The man of the most perfect virtue, the man whom we naturally love and revere the most, is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others."
Self-interest, yes, but in a system regulated just as much by the church and the aristocracy as by the flow of capital. Pure monetary greed without regard for doing what is right is nothing Smith would ever have advocated.
That's just passing the buck: instead of relying on the goodwill of government employees, you're now relying on the goodwill of Facebook employees. That's still "relying on goodwill" levels of security.
> If the source code isn't available for audit by 3rd parties (or yourself), and you can't build it from source, then it was never really "secure" anyway. What lawmakers do or don't say is just noise.
Careful - you're right that WhatsApp is untrustworthy, but laws that force them to add backdoors could well be applied to open-source code as well. Or make possession of non-backdoored software, open or not, illegal. Or compel OS/hardware manufacturers on which the code runs. The law is a dangerous thing to ignore.
If I can compile audited code from source myself, without any backdoors, then I can be reasonably assured there aren't any backdoors (excluding perhaps hardware level backdoors--but that's why we do the encryption in software).
Implementing hardware backdoors that are opaque to end users is theoretically possible, but more difficult in practice. You could, for example, build a screen/monitor that just captures everything on the screen and forwards it to some other entity, but in practice it's not so easy because of bandwidth limitations, etc. I suppose it would be much easier to create a physical keyboard that phones home over a mobile network, although it would only give you half the conversation.
I used to use Gentoo, and I built my entire OS from source. I'm not extraordinary in any way, I'm just an ordinary person who has a deep interest in software and computers.
I've done two "stage one" builds of Gentoo. I'm not super skilled but, I had a lot of time and reference material. My bet is that folks could but would not want to. There is significant time cost.
Also, I'm still using one of those original builds on my laptop - upgraded of course...still mad love for my daily driver.
It's a pretty automated process. I'd estimate 1/10 of all people who can use a computer and install software at all could do it if they wanted to and had sufficient time.
Check out Nix. Deterministic source derivations of pretty much anything you might want to build, trivially re-buildable from source by anyone. It takes seconds to install the "Nix Shell" on pretty much any of the modern OSes.
Now, to avoid the "Reflections On Trusting Trust" exploit, building the C compiler toolchain from known-good "root" compiler/linker toolchains, and then comparing the output vs. self-compilation is quite a bit harder.
Define "ordinary person", as plenty of people here have. However, there's very little difference between downloading a reproducible system that compiles everything on your machine and downloading a binary with a known checksum from a perspective of trust.
If you have multiple compilers and they all aren't infected in exactly the same way (e.g. one is not infected, or they have different types of infections) then you can detect there's a problem with them.
> If I can compile the code from source myself, without any backdoors, then I can be reasonably assured there aren't any backdoors
Where does that leave the rest of society? Having open source software and hardware is not enough, we also need laws that prohibit mass surveillance and support our efforts to uphold human rights.
Relying on laws leaves a lot of wiggle room for bad actors, slippery slopes, and political opinions changing over time. Laws are based on trust in institutions (do you _really_ trust large governments?).
Laws are probabilistic, whereas math & source code is deterministic. You can verify that computer code does what it says it does. Laws depend on enforcement and complicated judicial systems (based on humans) to interpret and apply the laws, which means they can effectively change over time, and the goalposts are never stationary.
I agree that laws are not enough, independent verification must be possible. But your right to use secure software, and to audit it without risking to spend your life in prison or being killed, is ensured by laws.
This is why moving the goalposts and further normalizing surveillance is extremely dangerous. The rights that you enjoy today are not universal, and can obviously be eradicated in less than a generation.
Yes, and we should strive to use all tools for a defense in depth of our rights. Laws are the first line of defense, then politics/media, then technology from software to hardware, and finally trust in our fellow humans and ourselves. That way if one (temporarily) fails, we can fall back to the others while repairing the breach.
There is no deterministic, technological solution to the problem that all technological solutions can be banned and its users threatened with draconian punishment.
There is no mathematical escape hatch from society. All we have is a messy assortment of technological mitigations that change the cost of surveillance.
These mitigations work best in combination with constitutional rights that limit what the government of the day can do, triggered by the latest outrage in the news.
Auditing a large codebase is also probabilistic. Oversights happen, and there are ways to write code that looks like it does the intended behavior while also doing a second, nefarious thing. See https://www.ioccc.org
the backdoor could be in the hardware - the logical conclusion of your position is that we should all fabricate our own computers from scratch so that we're sure that they're secure.
This is clearly a straw man, no one wants to do this, or is suggesting that we do this. But at some point, even the most hardened OSS advocate has to trust someone (usually the hardware manufacturer). You cannot verify that the device you're on doesn't spy on you, you have to rely on the manufacturer's word that it doesn't. And the manufacturer's suppliers, of course, because the manufacturer is trusting them.
Somewhere along the stack, we all have to draw a line and say "beyond this point, I trust that I am not being spied on". You choose to draw that line at the hardware point. Others choose to draw the line at the software point.
That's a weird way too see things. You are pretty much saying that wearing a bulletproof vest won't save you from the bullet, but laws forbidding to kill people somehow magically will. Well, I suppose you also could literally say that and I kinda can see where are you coming from, but I think it's somewhat delusional.
Proper law enforcement (mind the "enforcement" part) can make a neighborhood safe enough so that nobody tries to shoot you and you won't need to wear vests. But in the end of the day, if you are messing with bad people in the bad neighborhood: bulletproof vests are real, laws are not.
And when you are talking about government enforcing the laws that are supposed to forbid uncontrollable government agencies to do what they do: well, government kinda is bad people in the bad neighborhood.
The most concerning thing about mass surveillance and mass manipulation isn't the direct impact to some hypothetical enemy of the state (although that is concerning, people in that situation are more or less a lost cause), it's that public discourse and democracy can be pushed around by some small controlling group.
Source code availability isn’t really a solution to the trust problem. Sure, it allows for an audit, but the practical truth is that few people are qualified to perform those audits and few of them have a sufficient incentive to spend their time doing so.
So you still just invest trust in the maintainer or — if you’re lucky — the third party auditing firm who was paid to review the code.
That you can review the code doesn’t mean that anyone does so. At least not in an exhaustive and relevant way.
Closed source or open, the problem is made even worse now that we live in a Package Manager culture where even the simplest applications adopt dozens of dependencies.
I’m not saying that you should trust Facebook and their closed source applications, just that you’re not really all that safer trusting anyone else just because their source code is available.
I'm not sure I'd surmise the dependency of users to be an entire culture in and of itself. Plus, I feel like this splits hairs; going down the rabbit hole of "well who is checking the open source code" and "well who is checking the person checking the open source code" leads to endless complexity, especially when the move in question is more symbolic than substantive.
If WhatsApp did not use e2e encryption by default (and they didn't), then there was possibility of governments reading the communications anyway. Does this new announcement really lessen the security and privacy of the users? To me, it sounds like they are making the policy clearer to the public, since US / UK governments have not explicitly made press releases telling citizens which of their communications will be monitored. While I am very much a proponent to end-to-end encryption for ALL communications, I think this move isn't going to sacrifice privacy that users previously had.
Yes of course. The old argument that Linux is free of backdoors because it is open source. It's such a ridiculous claim. Software systems on that scale are so complex, there is NO way whatsoever to make sure there isn't a backdoor in there. I would go as far as saying that OpenSource software by definition is more vulnerable to backdoors than closed source software, exactly because the source code is available and anyone with some credibility can make patches. It is the dreamland scape of the NSA.
Hacking into closed source code is much more dangerous (politically) for them and also more difficult.
The thing with closed-source is that the binaries can be backdoored by the vendor on behalf of the NSA. This is not a new practice. With open-source code this venue is less likely to work and needs an additional layer of deception. Sure the NSA may manage to plant vulnerabilities, but flaws will not be persistent in the same way as when they're planted in cooperation with a vendor.
There's currently a push for reproducible builds which further hardens distros against such attacks.
Would you trust you can find any innocent 'bug' that could lead to a privilege escalation? Decades of vulnerabilities in software, open source or closed, would contradict that believe?
Just because it's open source doesn't make it trustworthy or bug free. Are you going to audit tends of thousands of lines of code to find an obscure vulnerability that a state actor has gotten added in a way that's not obvious?
>If I can compile the code from source myself, without any backdoors, then I can be reasonably assured there aren't any backdoors (excluding perhaps hardware level backdoors--but that's why we do the encryption in software).
Not necessarily. Have you ever heard of Ken Thompson's backdoored C compiler?
>When compiling its own binary, the compiler must compile these flaws
>When compiling some other preselected code (login function) it must compile some arbitrary backdoor
>Thus, the compiler works normally - when it compiles a login script or similar, it can create a security backdoor, and when it compiles newer versions of itself in the future, it retains the previous flaws - and the flaws will only exist in the compiler binary so are extremely difficult to detect.
It's not necessarily a viable attack method today, but it's the lesson behind it that's important. Anything can be compromised.
As soon as you’re building something written in, say, Javascript, then any semblance of assurance goes out of the window.
JS is an easy target. What about C or C++? You could audit the code but have you also audited your compiler? What if you used Visual Studio?
Code is an easy target. Can you trust the auditors themselves and in the absence of that, your own ability to detect a vulnerability?
The only bulletproof solution is to not use software.
That said, most of us are not as important or recognisable as we believe we are. The layperson won’t have a good reason to isolate their computer and install an airlock between their aluminium-lined office and the rest of their house.
This is just an updated version of the story about the US government scanning your emails for keywords after 9/11. They don’t even need to actually do it, they just need to say they do and most people will monitor their communications.
> If I can compile audited code from source myself, without any backdoors, then I can be reasonably assured there aren't any backdoors
Many people can compile code from source. Not so many people have the ability to audit code for obscured backdoors. The number of people that are capable to audit and have the time that is necessary to do it is practically nil.
Your assumption how backdoors work is very limited/wrong, I am afraid.
You assume that you actually understand the code well enough to identify the backdoor - e.g. as some sort of function that will bypass authentication when some secret hardwired password is provided (to give a dumb example).
However, to give a real world example of backdoored crypto, it is nothing of the sort. For example, the issue with the potentially backdoored Dual_EC_DRBG pseudorandom number generator has been known since 2004 at least - but the algorithm has been standardized by ISO/NIST and used for years until the potential backdoor issue was widely publicized following the Snowden leaks and the standard was withdrawn.
Good luck finding something like that only by reading code unless you are expert in crypto and mathematics. If you were only auditing code whether or not it matches the published, supposedly correct, standard (or algorithm description), you would never find this. The backdoored code was working completely fine, exactly as intended. But the weak random number generator allowed an adversary with sufficient computing resources to break the encryption.
Yes, it is theoretically possible to create backdoors that are hard or impossible to detect, if you start 20 years ago and subvert the standards used by the entire industry.
An improvement in security and privacy isn't limited to "make it impossible, even theoretically, for anything bad to ever happen OR you've accomplished nothing". Most back doors aren't inserted by competent NSA-level actors 20 years in advance. Most are "whenever a message passes through, send a copy to this third party". They are inserted by court order for a specific case due to the government becoming interested late in the game due to a specific case. For example, when terrorists start using some secure email service, the government tries to force the service to allow them to snoop on the relevant conversations. Open sourcing the code would allow you (with the help of the community) to detect these sorts of attempts when the product involves end-to-end encryption.
So while having the source and a community auditing changes to that source doesn't prevent every possible attack against your privacy, it prevents almost every one that is plausibly detectable, which is literally as good as you can do.
You're neglecting how a group of ignorant lawmakers could simply pass a law that forces secure-boot so your computer can only run proprietary OSes. Then they can force OS makers to only allow app store installs.
That assumes you can get the code. If it's illegal to distribute non-backdoored software, the code might be hard to get, for example Github might be forced to take it down.
How are you going to get that source code onto your phone, when loading unauthorized code becomes illegal? Who are you going to talk to, when everyone else is using the approved apps? Try to think ahead a little. This arrogant naive thinking is how geeks lose and politicians get it wrong while you're not paying attention and then everyone ends up living with the consequences.
If the source code is available for audit by 3rd parties, but nobody you trust have actually audited it (depending on your paranoia, this may be only yourself), then it was never really "secure" anyway.
> They could easily include a keylogger in WhatsApp and bypass the e2e encryption, for example, and us regular folk have no way of knowing.
This would be quickly detected by anyone looking at the data the WhatsApp app was sending back to the server (this isn't hard to do on a jailbroken device).
I agree with this, but I think the main problem is the centralization of trust, or the user having to place trust in one or two entities.
Imagine if 10 or 20 different organizations all had access to the source code and could vouch for the checskum of a each build.
While it would be nice if we could trust FB, Apple, etc., it would be much better if we didn't have to, and could simply trust others who have less to lose from alienating government officials.
Trust isn't binary. You can trust a company to keep your conversation private for most purposes without it being safe from a government wiretap. We do that whenever we use a phone.
Back in the day, it was illegal to export "good" encryption. There was nothing stopping it from happening technically, just like there is nothing stopping you from stealing from a convince store, except for the threat of enforcement.
But the threat of enforcement can have a strong chilling effect.
Bad analogy - exporting "good" encryption was illegal and while for individuals that was basically irrelevant, _companies_ would absolute follow that law. The analogy is not between "you stealing from a convenience store", it's "you running a company that has a known practice of robbing convenience stores". It's so incredibly illegal, you're not going to. There is no realistic hypothetical in which that decision would even remotely make sense.
> If the source code isn't available for audit by 3rd parties (or yourself), and you can't build it from source, then it was never really "secure" anyway. What lawmakers do or don't say is just noise.
It's still nice to see this spelled out since I've seen many people claim that WhatsApp being closed source is not that problematic. This is definitive confirmation that it cannot be trusted anymore and it's time to start working on the problem (both from a legislative point and by seeking out and moving to technological alternatives).
Unless you have reproducible builds, having access to the source code can be deceiving.
Audits should start with the actual binary. Only if you can ensure that the binary was build from a specific source code and does not contain any other logic in there (i.e. it was build by a trusted compiler), you can happily skip the decompilation process and analyze that source instead.
1) If someone wants to find something you are "hiding", they will anyway. It's always been like this. Encryption is never a protection against this.
2) Personally I still think e2e encryption is not a secure solution on operating systems that runs godmode 3rd party, eg. google play services: it relies on a key that can be stolen too many ways too easily. Signal included.
3) internet eons (20 years) ago we nearly all used plain text IRC, closed source ICQ, AIM, etc, apart from a few. Recently I started to question the usefulness of "encrypt everything": we do need a way to verify the content from end to end, but is encryption really the way to do so? Are there any other ways, signatures, hashes, etc?
4) All that said, I'm not surprised. Skype used to be p2p, until M$ moved it to server-client, because "battery life". Everything is moving back to the Eternal Mainframe in this cycle.
The landscape changed. More people use the internet, more spy agencies from multiple countries siphon traffic en bulk, information of higher value is exchanged over the internet, more untrusted parties are involved (e.g. wifi hotspots).
I mean go ahead, do everything unencrypted. But I surely won't entrust data to you if you're leaking like a sieve.
That is not what I wrote. I wrote "encrypt everything". There is valuable and useful use of encryption, I'm just not certain everything everywhere needs it or benefits from it.
It's a sensible default since the developers don't know when users will need it and users don't want to bother to choose for every single action they take. And they may not even know in advance that they will need it. An innocent conversation can quickly turn into something confidential or private.
That said, I do agree that p2p is preferable since it cuts out a central party that can be strongarmed by government being in control
Most of what the federal government does is against one or another amendment (the 10th mostly) but gets slipped by under the commerce clause as that's how the system turned out.
You can and should block your keyboard app's access to the network using a firewall. However, this will require root access and I've seen people jump at this point to say you absolutely should not have root access to your own phone, which I find pretty ridiculous and unacceptable.
In every comment thread where quitting Facebook is discussed I find commenters saying they can't because Facebook is so indispensable for them. Maybe the same is assumed for criminals?
>> while the U.S. won’t be able to use information obtained from British firms in any cases carrying the death penalty.
Lol. So I guess it cannot be used for actual terrorism. They can use it up until an act of terrorism occurs. Then, now that murder charges are on the table, they cannot use the same date source to catch the perpetrators? The US isn't going to waive the death penalty on every terror case. That isn't politically possible.
We have to just admit that US laws are increasingly incompatible with those of the rest of the world. Treaties are getting harder and harder to reconcile. The US needs to back off its departure from international norms.
Or they want political cover to avoid revealing their capabilities, or to enable that data to be used more easily in court or for a wider range of offences.
590 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] thread> The U.K. and the U.S. have agreed not to investigate each other’s citizens as part of the deal
I suppose they'll just pass the laws(?) making it all illegal but only enforce it when it's politically useful or if someone rocks the boat.
In the US, ITAR could hypothetically be used to make open-sourcing of cryptographic algorithms illegal. This technique is used for robotics software that could be dual-purposed for weapons guidance.
That said, freedom can also be in our own minds, creating a good life in an ocean of political corruption and increasing control of corporations/elites. It would take more effort, but I think I could also have a good life in Gibson’s sci-fi worlds.
Wikipedia has some good info re: export of cryptography[0].
In addition, two circuits (Ninth[1] and Sixth[2]) have ruled that source code is protected by the First Amendment.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernstein_v._United_States
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junger_v._Daley
Obviously, classifying something that has already been open source just makes it more difficult to use and numerous local copies will be retained, but it does make further distribution illegal.
This is the only mechanism I can think of by which the US government could kill Signal in its existing open-source form. It's ugly, but not unthinkable.
OpenBSD in the 90s used to emphasize that they're from Canada and have strong crypto because of that.
(The headline on Bloomberg, "Facebook, WhatsApp Will Have to Share Messages With U.K. Police" is more restrained.)
And worrying that a large number of readers interpretation of the article was influenced by a headline. We really have to do better and be vigilantly aware of how media and power influences public opinion, especially during times such as these.
...that are US-based. You may want to check out Threema for a valid WhatsApp replacement.
It is entirely possible though to have a true end-to-end encrypted channel if both parties are able to do the encryption in their heads without the plain text message ever being visible. A trivial practical example would be a single bit message with a single bit one time pad (agree ahead of time that if I say yes on the phone, it means no and vice versa).
Also, the article is unclear about whether the messages have to be decrypted before being shared, so they may just have to share the encrypted message.
I would expect such an accord between countries to enable data sharing, not force companies to record more data. So I'm sceptical of the article's claim for now.
This sounds as if the platforms are already sharing with the US authorities. So this being about them sharing it now with UK authorities.
I would, except it requires a mobile phone number.
I agree with that analysis, but it's not clear to me why we don't have similar levels of skepticism about auto-updating desktop apps. Signal in particular uses a third-party software repository, so if it wanted to push a malicious update, it wouldn't even need to sneak it past package maintainers.
Package signing protects you against developers with bad personal security practices, because it makes it harder for a third-party to MITM their apps. But it doesn't do anything I can see to protect you from a developer that turns malicious in the future.
Whether anyone is actually doing that is another question. And there is no technical reason app stores couldn't send a special backdoor-ed build to select list of users under surveillance if government forced them to. (They can target sets of users for staged roll-outs, beta programs, etc.) Which defeats the notion that one person watching can detect it for everybody.
On the other hand, it's possible to do stuff with smart phones at the platform level. Whether through vulnerabilities or some platform capability (updates, etc.), it may be possible to have a backdoor-ed binary that looks to the user like it is the regular binary. That's not a capability that Signal has, but it is a capability that might very well exist.
Regardless of all that, for users who have auto-updates enabled (most users), even if Signal can't silently push a backdoor-ed update, they can unilaterally push one. You could wake up tomorrow with a different version that has a backdoor, so even if you can identify backdoor-ed binaries, you have to turn off updates or verify the binary every time you open the app.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Binary_Transparency
When you install an app (whether through an app store, or side-loading) the app should state the location online of an append-only log that lists all the releases (with timestamps) for that app. The phone OS could periodically check to see if an upgrade is available, and security researchers could check that the log doesn't contain references to versions which aren't available to the public.
Ideally there should perhaps also be a way for users to anonymously report which version of any app they are using, so that people with particular security concerns could configure their OS to only update an app after, for example, 50% of users have already installed the update.
Telegram is subject to US coercion as much as any US company: both major app stores are US-based, and without app store distribution, a product might as well be dead as far as the masses are concerned.
From the article:
Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, has previously warned that Facebook’s plan to enable users to send end-to-end encrypted messages would benefit criminals, and called on social media firms to develop “back doors” to give intelligence agencies access to their messaging platforms.
Why comment if you didn't read the article? It's in the first paragraph: "Social media platforms based in the U.S. including Facebook and WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages with British police under a new treaty"
That's the UK's position but it's not clear from the article that some kind of forced backdoor made it into the treaty, just that WhatsApp will be forced to share users’ encrypted messages. But they have already been sharing encrypted messages through other legal means.
More speculation here: https://www.justsecurity.org/24145/u-s-u-k-data-sharing-trea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
"Encrypted" could mean that's how they'll be delivered to the UK.
Or it could be a definition of the set of which messages are in question. The set is defined as the ones that users expected were supposed to be protected by encryption (or that government could not access because of encryption).
In other words, from the phrasing alone, it's not clear whether "encrypted" describes the state of the messages or the scope of the sharing.
Similarly the UK has had its spying ruled unlawful under ECHR: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/sep/13/gchq-data-co... (perhaps this is why Richard Dearlove, "C" of MI6, is so Brexity)
The safe variant LibreSignal was killed by Signal. https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/wiki/What-to-do-a...
> To be clear: the reason for this is not security. To the best of my knowledge, the Signal protocol is cryptographically sound, and your communications should still be secure. The reason has much more to do with the way the project is run, the focus and certain dependencies of the official (Android) Signal app, as well as the future of the Internet, and what future we would like to build and live in.
Beyond the author flat out saying that it’s secure- the title of the article is why they will not recommend it. It has nothing to do with it being compromised.
>Priti Patel, the U.K.’s home secretary, has previously warned that Facebook’s plan to enable users to send end-to-end encrypted messages would benefit criminals...
In London alone, it is not possible to pay for public transport with cash. A debit card/oyster is required but for anonymous travel, an oyster can be topped up via cash and reduces transport surveillance, unlike using credit / debit cards. Their reasons for doing this because it "benefits criminals" is echoing the "ban encryption" nonsense.
> The U.K. and the U.S. have agreed not to investigate each other’s citizens as part of the deal...
This I don't believe.
EDIT: Use a oyster card for public anonymous transport, refrain from using a credit / debit card for this.
I live in the UK and I feel like this is the crux of the issue. I am an active member of a sports car forum in the UK and it's terrifying how little police does in case of theft, even when the house was broken into to get the keys. If you get someone to come out and write down a report that is a miracle in itself - in 90% of cases you are just given a case number and told to speak with your insurer, nothing is ever done. I know a guy whose Range Rover was stolen, he reported it, no one came out - then few days later found it parked in a car park nearby, he rang the police to tell them that he found his stolen car, where it is, and asked if they want to come over and maybe catch whoever comes for it(or you know, maybe take fingerprints and such)? Nah, he was told that if he still has the key he can just take it, they don't have any officers to actually come out anyway. I have friends who were robbed, burgled ,and literally nothing is ever done. There is zero police on the roads around where I live, I'm actually surprised people still follow the rules of the road because realistically, the chances of ever running into a police car are somewhere around zero.
It just feels like police in the UK has been gutted to the point that unless you are literally being shot/stabbed, there is not enough resources to actually help or investigate anything. It's a shell of a functional service.
I can't say this in any less of a politically charged way but 10 years of austerity will do that.
Please don't irresponsibly spread this kind of inaccurate information. Crime in London is not unusually high.
You can also buy cash tickets like a travel card
Not strictly true. You can buy an oyster card with cash, you can load it with cash and use that. After a weeks worth of journeys you can return it and get your £5 deposit back and buy another one.
Not exactly perfect but it's essentially the same as having a burner phone.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/facial-recogniti...
(As an aside, there was meant to be a parliamentary review of the Assistance and Access Act earlier this year -- but I haven't heard anything about it.)
It’d be a big deal to force FB to modify WhatsApp for message content interception and I think it’d be challenged in court.
This is the newspaper that had an editorial starting with "Hurrah the Blackshirts".
https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2017/oct/31/horrible-h...
Other than using it as a way of keeping an eye on what some people in my society will believe (because the Mail told them to) I see zero merit in it's continued existence.
It's a cancer with a masthead.
The Express and Telegraph were right facing, honest but partisan newspapers forty or fifty years ago. Now the Express is a racist comic, and since the famously and comically reclusive Barclay brothers bought it, the Telegraph is working on getting down to the Mail's level. The Mail are currently working on buying the i.
There really isn't much left on the right that you can rely on. Which is depressing considering most of our press is right leaning.
>WhatsApp has no ability to see the content of messages or listen to calls on WhatsApp. That’s because the encryption and decryption of messages sent on WhatsApp occurs entirely on your device. Before a message ever leaves your device, it's secured with a cryptographic lock, and only the recipient has the keys.[...]
>A search warrant issued under the procedures described in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure or equivalent state warrant procedures upon a showing of probable cause is required to compel the disclosure of the stored contents of any account, which may include "about" information, profile photos, group information and address book, if available. In the ordinary course of providing our service, WhatsApp does not store messages once they are delivered or transaction logs of such delivered messages, and undelivered messages are deleted from our servers after 30 days. WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption for our services, which is always activated
Very interested to see what their response is and if their promise holds that they do not have technical access to content but merely to account information.
Even if FB / WhatsApp doesn't currently have such a capability, there's no legal guarantee they couldn't be compelled to add it, thereby putting them in conflict with language that didn't include that clause.
Afaik, case law is murky over whether creating new code qualifies as speech (illegal to compel) or facilitating legally-approved wiretapping (legal and required).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_records_exception
More interesting is what happens if someone gets a new phone. In that case (if I understood correctly) they might ask for the sender to resend the messages with a different key. If they really are forced to add a backdoor then that's where I would fit in a MITM attack, as it is limited in scale and detectable when used excessively.
Pretending and using obfuscated language to lead the reader to believe otherwise is disingenuous.
Platforms that rely on trust (in this case, trusting that FB isn't doing bad things) provide very weak guarantees about privacy/security. They could easily include a keylogger in WhatsApp and bypass the e2e encryption, for example, and us regular folk have no way of knowing.
The fly in the ointment is the client might have additional functionality to leak the e2e encryption key. That is far harder to find, but if it's use were widespread, it would be found by researchers.
The whole point is moot though - whatsapp is designed to (by default) upload cleartext chat logs to google/apple servers. Since all chats have 2+ recipients, the conversation is only safe from snooping if nobody in the chat has backup enabled, which is unlikely.
They could indeed serve you a different binary from the app-store. "Do you think that's Whatsapp you're using?"
I have much more trust in the former than the latter.
I suspect most people want to keep their $500k+/year jobs instead of sticking their necks out. My friends who work at FAANG are largely mentally checked out, and just do it to collect their monies and retire ASAP. You can't pay rent with good feelings.
So just keep making the world shittier. Gotta love individualist capitalism.
Raised the standard of living for billions.
If you define the free market as nothing other than anarchy, then yes the free market is rare indeed.
But I don't that know anyone that speaks in such absolutes.
No one quote in particular; just a recurring theme.
"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest"
- The Wealth of Nations
"The natural effort of every individual to better his own condition...is so powerful, that it is alone, and without any assistance, not only capable of carrying on the society to wealth and prosperity, but of surmounting a hundred impertinent obstructions with which the folly of human laws too often encumbers its operations."
- The Wealth of Nations
"The statesman who should attempt to direct private people in what manner they ought to employ their capitals, would...assume an authority which could safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever"
- The Wealth of Nations
"In spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity [capitalists] are led by an invisible hand...and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of society"
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments
> Have you read him?
Yes.
"The man of the most perfect virtue, the man whom we naturally love and revere the most, is he who joins, to the most perfect command of his own original and selfish feelings, the most exquisite sensibility both to the original and sympathetic feelings of others."
Self-interest, yes, but in a system regulated just as much by the church and the aristocracy as by the flow of capital. Pure monetary greed without regard for doing what is right is nothing Smith would ever have advocated.
Careful - you're right that WhatsApp is untrustworthy, but laws that force them to add backdoors could well be applied to open-source code as well. Or make possession of non-backdoored software, open or not, illegal. Or compel OS/hardware manufacturers on which the code runs. The law is a dangerous thing to ignore.
Implementing hardware backdoors that are opaque to end users is theoretically possible, but more difficult in practice. You could, for example, build a screen/monitor that just captures everything on the screen and forwards it to some other entity, but in practice it's not so easy because of bandwidth limitations, etc. I suppose it would be much easier to create a physical keyboard that phones home over a mobile network, although it would only give you half the conversation.
*edit: added the word "audited".
You could also decompile the Whatsapp APK and do the same thing (it's Java after all).
Look no further than the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability
https://www.archive.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p7...
It's one of the reasons the Debian project has worked so hard at reproducible builds: https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds/About
Bugs can certainly occur (like Heartbleed etc) but the alternative (closed source opaque binary blobs) is much worse.
Also, I'm still using one of those original builds on my laptop - upgraded of course...still mad love for my daily driver.
And so they never learned, and so they "can't".
In the same way, I can't use Gentoo or vim or compile either or ski or... :D
Now, to avoid the "Reflections On Trusting Trust" exploit, building the C compiler toolchain from known-good "root" compiler/linker toolchains, and then comparing the output vs. self-compilation is quite a bit harder.
If you have multiple compilers and they all aren't infected in exactly the same way (e.g. one is not infected, or they have different types of infections) then you can detect there's a problem with them.
Where does that leave the rest of society? Having open source software and hardware is not enough, we also need laws that prohibit mass surveillance and support our efforts to uphold human rights.
Laws are probabilistic, whereas math & source code is deterministic. You can verify that computer code does what it says it does. Laws depend on enforcement and complicated judicial systems (based on humans) to interpret and apply the laws, which means they can effectively change over time, and the goalposts are never stationary.
This is why moving the goalposts and further normalizing surveillance is extremely dangerous. The rights that you enjoy today are not universal, and can obviously be eradicated in less than a generation.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/remembering-case-estab...
There is no mathematical escape hatch from society. All we have is a messy assortment of technological mitigations that change the cost of surveillance.
These mitigations work best in combination with constitutional rights that limit what the government of the day can do, triggered by the latest outrage in the news.
This is clearly a straw man, no one wants to do this, or is suggesting that we do this. But at some point, even the most hardened OSS advocate has to trust someone (usually the hardware manufacturer). You cannot verify that the device you're on doesn't spy on you, you have to rely on the manufacturer's word that it doesn't. And the manufacturer's suppliers, of course, because the manufacturer is trusting them.
Somewhere along the stack, we all have to draw a line and say "beyond this point, I trust that I am not being spied on". You choose to draw that line at the hardware point. Others choose to draw the line at the software point.
Proper law enforcement (mind the "enforcement" part) can make a neighborhood safe enough so that nobody tries to shoot you and you won't need to wear vests. But in the end of the day, if you are messing with bad people in the bad neighborhood: bulletproof vests are real, laws are not.
And when you are talking about government enforcing the laws that are supposed to forbid uncontrollable government agencies to do what they do: well, government kinda is bad people in the bad neighborhood.
So you still just invest trust in the maintainer or — if you’re lucky — the third party auditing firm who was paid to review the code.
That you can review the code doesn’t mean that anyone does so. At least not in an exhaustive and relevant way.
Closed source or open, the problem is made even worse now that we live in a Package Manager culture where even the simplest applications adopt dozens of dependencies.
I’m not saying that you should trust Facebook and their closed source applications, just that you’re not really all that safer trusting anyone else just because their source code is available.
Correct use of past tense. In the present, e2e encryption is by default.
> Does this new announcement really lessen the security and privacy of the users?
Yes it does, since e2e encryption is enabled by default now. Best I can tell, there’s no way to disable it either.
Hacking into closed source code is much more dangerous (politically) for them and also more difficult.
There's currently a push for reproducible builds which further hardens distros against such attacks.
Not necessarily. Have you ever heard of Ken Thompson's backdoored C compiler?
https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/1848...
>Re-write compiler code to contain 2 flaws:
>When compiling its own binary, the compiler must compile these flaws
>When compiling some other preselected code (login function) it must compile some arbitrary backdoor
>Thus, the compiler works normally - when it compiles a login script or similar, it can create a security backdoor, and when it compiles newer versions of itself in the future, it retains the previous flaws - and the flaws will only exist in the compiler binary so are extremely difficult to detect.
It's not necessarily a viable attack method today, but it's the lesson behind it that's important. Anything can be compromised.
As soon as you’re building something written in, say, Javascript, then any semblance of assurance goes out of the window.
JS is an easy target. What about C or C++? You could audit the code but have you also audited your compiler? What if you used Visual Studio?
Code is an easy target. Can you trust the auditors themselves and in the absence of that, your own ability to detect a vulnerability?
The only bulletproof solution is to not use software.
That said, most of us are not as important or recognisable as we believe we are. The layperson won’t have a good reason to isolate their computer and install an airlock between their aluminium-lined office and the rest of their house.
This is just an updated version of the story about the US government scanning your emails for keywords after 9/11. They don’t even need to actually do it, they just need to say they do and most people will monitor their communications.
Many people can compile code from source. Not so many people have the ability to audit code for obscured backdoors. The number of people that are capable to audit and have the time that is necessary to do it is practically nil.
You assume that you actually understand the code well enough to identify the backdoor - e.g. as some sort of function that will bypass authentication when some secret hardwired password is provided (to give a dumb example).
However, to give a real world example of backdoored crypto, it is nothing of the sort. For example, the issue with the potentially backdoored Dual_EC_DRBG pseudorandom number generator has been known since 2004 at least - but the algorithm has been standardized by ISO/NIST and used for years until the potential backdoor issue was widely publicized following the Snowden leaks and the standard was withdrawn.
Good luck finding something like that only by reading code unless you are expert in crypto and mathematics. If you were only auditing code whether or not it matches the published, supposedly correct, standard (or algorithm description), you would never find this. The backdoored code was working completely fine, exactly as intended. But the weak random number generator allowed an adversary with sufficient computing resources to break the encryption.
An improvement in security and privacy isn't limited to "make it impossible, even theoretically, for anything bad to ever happen OR you've accomplished nothing". Most back doors aren't inserted by competent NSA-level actors 20 years in advance. Most are "whenever a message passes through, send a copy to this third party". They are inserted by court order for a specific case due to the government becoming interested late in the game due to a specific case. For example, when terrorists start using some secure email service, the government tries to force the service to allow them to snoop on the relevant conversations. Open sourcing the code would allow you (with the help of the community) to detect these sorts of attempts when the product involves end-to-end encryption.
So while having the source and a community auditing changes to that source doesn't prevent every possible attack against your privacy, it prevents almost every one that is plausibly detectable, which is literally as good as you can do.
That assumes you can get the code. If it's illegal to distribute non-backdoored software, the code might be hard to get, for example Github might be forced to take it down.
This would be quickly detected by anyone looking at the data the WhatsApp app was sending back to the server (this isn't hard to do on a jailbroken device).
Imagine if 10 or 20 different organizations all had access to the source code and could vouch for the checskum of a each build.
While it would be nice if we could trust FB, Apple, etc., it would be much better if we didn't have to, and could simply trust others who have less to lose from alienating government officials.
Back in the day, it was illegal to export "good" encryption. There was nothing stopping it from happening technically, just like there is nothing stopping you from stealing from a convince store, except for the threat of enforcement.
But the threat of enforcement can have a strong chilling effect.
It's still nice to see this spelled out since I've seen many people claim that WhatsApp being closed source is not that problematic. This is definitive confirmation that it cannot be trusted anymore and it's time to start working on the problem (both from a legislative point and by seeking out and moving to technological alternatives).
Audits should start with the actual binary. Only if you can ensure that the binary was build from a specific source code and does not contain any other logic in there (i.e. it was build by a trusted compiler), you can happily skip the decompilation process and analyze that source instead.
2) Personally I still think e2e encryption is not a secure solution on operating systems that runs godmode 3rd party, eg. google play services: it relies on a key that can be stolen too many ways too easily. Signal included.
3) internet eons (20 years) ago we nearly all used plain text IRC, closed source ICQ, AIM, etc, apart from a few. Recently I started to question the usefulness of "encrypt everything": we do need a way to verify the content from end to end, but is encryption really the way to do so? Are there any other ways, signatures, hashes, etc?
4) All that said, I'm not surprised. Skype used to be p2p, until M$ moved it to server-client, because "battery life". Everything is moving back to the Eternal Mainframe in this cycle.
I mean go ahead, do everything unencrypted. But I surely won't entrust data to you if you're leaking like a sieve.
That is not what I wrote. I wrote "encrypt everything". There is valuable and useful use of encryption, I'm just not certain everything everywhere needs it or benefits from it.
That said, I do agree that p2p is preferable since it cuts out a central party that can be strongarmed by government being in control
I would think this should at least be against one or another amendment for Americans?
Wow !! Just realized that.
> Share snippets: Automatically share snippets of what and how you type in Google apps to improve Gboard [enabled by default]
It seems this would only serve to catch the most stupid small-time criminals.
Lol. So I guess it cannot be used for actual terrorism. They can use it up until an act of terrorism occurs. Then, now that murder charges are on the table, they cannot use the same date source to catch the perpetrators? The US isn't going to waive the death penalty on every terror case. That isn't politically possible.
We have to just admit that US laws are increasingly incompatible with those of the rest of the world. Treaties are getting harder and harder to reconcile. The US needs to back off its departure from international norms.