Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard • Hacker News Board

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#61

Post by dwaite » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

keanebean86 wrote: post #57

jcampbell1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A stop gap solution is to add an api for “secure copy” that 1Password and the like can implement which makes it unreadable without a user initiated paste. This would take far less time to implement from Apple’s side.

It's weird that apps can straight read from the clipboard at all. I would think the OS just hands the app a pointer to the data and maybe some meta data for type.

It gives you a list of alternative content types and an API to get content - but pasting is an app-controlled activity, not an OS one.

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#62

Post by ryandrake » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #38

hamburglar wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, well, say "No" all you want but this totally happens, only the perpetrators are not nearly so clue-ful as to realize they've shipped a trojan. There are "helpful" SDKs out there whose ulterior purpose is to collect user data without the app author's knowledge. This is one reason I'm very wary about what apps I'll install... it's not enough to trust the app author if they include 3rd party code.

Pretty sure at least some of those are “helpful” in the sense of “this is one of the ways we make money, by installing someone else’s sdk in our game and getting paid for it, while not looking too carefully at what it’s doing to our users”. And I’d be astounded if various Facebook/Google/Twitter SDKs (including things like Fabric/Crashlytics and Google Analytics) haven’t done this in the past even if they’re not doin…

This comes up all the time on HN and I’m always shocked[1] at how controversial an idea it is that the developer is responsible for knowing what they are shipping in their dependencies. “Oh, woe, how can you audit all of your dependencies and their dependencies and know what’s in them?? Oh it’s impossible! There is no way to solve this!”

Too few devs are really careful about their dependencies and do good due diligence when evaluating them for suitability. Everyone else is just “Hey our problem is solved by this one. YOLO! Link it and ship it LOL!” I’ve seen projects that link and ship binary dependencies without even being able to inspect the source. This is, to me, totally insane. But standard practice in a lot of places!

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21439953

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#63

Post by nicky0 » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 4:20 AM UTC

ken wrote: post #60

lazyjones wrote: post #7

Is there a MacOS utility that clears the pasteboard N minutes after its last content change?

Not efficiently. There's no "clipboard changed" notification on macOS. Such a utility would have to run in the background and constantly query the clipboard. And since the clipboard basically holds a list of types and a way to ask the owning application for data, you'd have to keep waking up the clipboard owner, too, to ask it for data. Would you check every type it declares? Some applications support dozens of types…

You can poll the changeCount property to quickly check if the clipboard has been updated.

You would not need to constantly wake up the clipboard owner. To “clear” the clipboard you just upload a new clipboard with an empty string.

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#64

Post by _bxg1 » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 4:22 AM UTC

banana_giraffe wrote: post #25

Something that confuses me: Windows app can do this. Heck, in the case of a Windows app, you need not even poll the clipboard, you can sign up for notifications when it changes. The API is ancient, well documented, and provides no feedback when it's being used. And some apps indeed use it, one obvious one is remote desktop apps use it to "sniff" what's in the clipboard to mirror it along. Is there a reason whatever s…

Many of today's apps are user-hostile. Most of those apps, on desktop, end up taking the form of a website. Web browsers have much stricter policies than desktop OSes; much more akin to mobile OSes. The desktop app model was designed with the assumption that you 100% trust everything you install.

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#65

Post by ryandrake » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 4:22 AM UTC

nreece wrote: post #53

If iOS apps are snooping on the pasteboard/clipboard, then surely many Android apps are doing so too. It's worrisome specially when copy-pasting from password managers. Not sure if 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane etc. offer any protection.

Android recently [1] blocked app background access to the clipboard.

1: https://www.xda-developers.com/android-q-blocks-background-c...

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#66

Post by banana_giraffe » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 4:39 AM UTC

snailmailman wrote: post #54

banana_giraffe wrote: post #25

Something that confuses me: Windows app can do this. Heck, in the case of a Windows app, you need not even poll the clipboard, you can sign up for notifications when it changes. The API is ancient, well documented, and provides no feedback when it's being used. And some apps indeed use it, one obvious one is remote desktop apps use it to "sniff" what's in the clipboard to mirror it along. Is there a reason whatever s…

Windows itself can do this. Win+V will now will up clipboard history. I had no idea it existed initially, but until i disabled it there was a nice easy-access list of all of my recently used passwords. I assume other programs can't access that. But I don't want Microsoft syncing all my clipboard history to the cloud. No thanks.

Well, "Clipboard.GetHistoryItemsAsync" does in fact exist. No clue what the rules are for calling it.

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#67

Post by nixpulvis » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 4:51 AM UTC

banana_giraffe wrote: post #25

Something that confuses me: Windows app can do this. Heck, in the case of a Windows app, you need not even poll the clipboard, you can sign up for notifications when it changes. The API is ancient, well documented, and provides no feedback when it's being used. And some apps indeed use it, one obvious one is remote desktop apps use it to "sniff" what's in the clipboard to mirror it along. Is there a reason whatever s…

I think it's partially because we're taught to treat "Apps" like candy, and "Applications" like something a bit... well... more?

At some level, I think this means that the expectation is that I should just, on a whim, download and play with an App. But when it comes to Applications, I should do my homework. Plus, Apple's already done my homework for me amiright /s.

This is of course completely backwards, since the App Store doesn't let me try before I buy, while Applications (as I'm trying to use the term) exist on platforms with less hostile restrictions.

---

It's also partially because we're becoming more sensitive to these issues as society, and most people use their phones a lot more than their computers, honestly.

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#68

Post by bigiain » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 4:51 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #62

bigiain wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure at least some of those are “helpful” in the sense of “this is one of the ways we make money, by installing someone else’s sdk in our game and getting paid for it, while not looking too carefully at what it’s doing to our users”. And I’d be astounded if various Facebook/Google/Twitter SDKs (including things like Fabric/Crashlytics and Google Analytics) haven’t done this in the past even if they’re not doin…

This comes up all the time on HN and I’m always shocked[1] at how controversial an idea it is that the developer is responsible for knowing what they are shipping in their dependencies. “Oh, woe, how can you audit all of your dependencies and their dependencies and know what’s in them?? Oh it’s impossible! There is no way to solve this!” Too few devs are really careful about their dependencies and do good due diligen…

While I totally agree with what you say here, I think it goes deeper. Some devs/shops are complicit in this, knowingly adding dependencies for shady reasons.

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#69

Post by lathiat » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 4:53 AM UTC

banana_giraffe wrote: post #25

Something that confuses me: Windows app can do this. Heck, in the case of a Windows app, you need not even poll the clipboard, you can sign up for notifications when it changes. The API is ancient, well documented, and provides no feedback when it's being used. And some apps indeed use it, one obvious one is remote desktop apps use it to "sniff" what's in the clipboard to mirror it along. Is there a reason whatever s…

These security trade-offs are not really OK on desktop either, but Windows (and macOS) have a long tail of backwards compatibility they are trying to maintain and slowly steer towards similar security levels (as in the case of the mac app store or the windows store platform). Both of those platforms are struggling to do that although have made some incremental progress but nowhere near the degree that iOS has.

iOS was designed very early on with heavy sandboxing and as a new platform that was happy to break many of the norms of desktops. They have been very successful in having a usable platform that is heavily sandboxed and closes more of these snooping holes over time. Of course the trade-off has been flexibility and it has taken them a long time to get where they are now and have a usable OS and also have such sandboxing. (remember the first iPhone didn't even have an app store!)

To some extent most applications moving to being web-based has won a lot of this sandboxing on desktop that it wouldn't have otherwise had, and web apps cannot read from the clipboard in modern browsers.

Re: Popular iPhone and iPad Apps Snooping on the Pasteboard

#70

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 5:33 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #44

diebeforei485 wrote: post #2

As web browsers have gotten more privacy-aware, native apps have fallen behind. This is just another example of that. Recent versions of Chrome show a prompt when websites do this in javascript.

> Recent versions of Chrome show a prompt when websites do this in javascript. Tin foil hat version: “ ... when website’s other then Google’s do this in JavaScript”... (It’s sad how much trust Goog have lost, at least with me. I don’t seriously thing Goog would try to slip that behaviour into Chrome, but it’s close enough to believable to make it a funny/not funny response...)

Well, I mean...

Chrome does ship with a Google Docs "app" that lets the site access the clipboard for right-click pasting.