if you can't trust Meta, why could you trust apple?
Apple has been building their brand on privacy and trust for at least a couple of years now. Can you be sure they're not sending everything to the NSA? Of course not. But they also make their money by directly charging users for services unlike the ad-based companies. There have also been many attempts by various governments to publicly force Apple to insert backdoors or prevent them from fixing security vulnerabilit…
Telegram implements video calling using bunch of sketchy C code same as WhatsApp and Signal. There's no reason to think it's less vulnerable these sort of bugs.
"sketchy c code" is a tautology
No, OpenBSD and sqlite exist; "sketchy c code" is only mostly redundant.
Off topic: Why does WhatsApp don't give the option to block all calls and texts by default? That way, I can only talk with folks I want. The signal app has that option. Random businesses can send you texts to promote their shity services (typically, your number is grabbed from data brokers or leaks). Of course, you can block and report such spam, but there is no DnD option right now. Alt url as nvd is under load: Cri…
I am one of these "WhatsApp spammers" (well, I don't consider myself a spammer but you might!). We sell financial services in a developing country. We're not a mobile app—we're just a mobile-first website (a common gripe on HN is 'there's too many apps, just make a website'. Well, we're one of them). We need to be able to get in touch with our customers for transactional purposes (changes to their account, delivery n…
Why would any of that require you to send unsolicited messages? If the user wants notifications, they can add you to their contacts
These applications should be treated as Trojan horses. If they aren’t open source and you are a journalist/dissident or anyone targeted by nation states you have got to assume your WhatsApp/Facebook is being used to compromise your device.
Even the App Store version of Signal is allegedly not the same as what's in the open source project. So unless you compile and install the applications yourself, there's no way of knowing anything.
If you're running iOS then I always assume the random number generator is backdoored by the NSA anyway. That's got to be the single juiciest target going; frankly if the NSA haven't backdoored that then what are they even spending tax dollars on?
It's definitely a lot better in memory safe languages (and especially in those applications that don't depend on C libraries under the hood). You can still have security bugs due to logic errors, but you won't ever get remote code execution or ability to read arbitrary memory. And in general bugs are much more likely to cause a crash rather than give the attacker access. I suspect once C has been supplanted all the w…
It is true that memory-safe languages are a massive massive massive boon! I believe that the entire industry needs to be making plans to find a way to shift all applications that operate on untrusted data away from C and C++. But this is completely orthogonal to the purported security benefits of making your source available.
IMO it’s not entirely orthogonal. One of the main benefits (from a security perspective) of open sourcing your app is to allow it to be audited more thoroughly. But even with that kind of auditing it’s hard to make thing secure in non memory safe languages. If you have both, then we might expect open sourcing to more reliably lead to an actually secure app.
What is the impact of this vulnerability? I don’t see what an attacker can do if they successfully exploited this. Since this is in a bundled library does it help me get past the iOS sandbox for example? If so can one steal WhatsApp keys? What is the fallout, does anyone know?
It runs as whatsapp so if you allowed it access to photos, location, etc you gain that. Very powerful stuff.
Notably on iOS there's no good way to isolate unsafe native libraries from the rest of your app without violating app store policies, because Apple enforces apps to be single process and doesn't allow use of its own sandboxing apis.
You can compile your less trusted libraries to webassembly and then run them in a webview?
That sounds like a huge hit to energy use, if it is even feasible for something like implementing webrtc because of communication costs with the native process.
On this subject, I like to quote Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram: "Since the creation of WhatsApp, there's hardly been a moment in which it was secure: every few months researchers uncover a new security issue in the app. I wrote about this in detail 2 years ago (read here if you missed it). Nothing has changed since then. It would be hard to believe that the technical team of WhatsApp is so consistently incompe…
I strongly dislike this perspective and find it naive. It is similar to saying Mac is more secure than Windows. WhatsApp is a huge target compared to Telegram. I guarantee you if we all switched to Telegram nothing would change, and I would bet money these exploits boil down to open source libraries which are commonly used in these apps. It does not pay to be high browed with security. Even Chrome, with all its inves…
Microsoft software is in its own apex class of insecurity and vulnerability.
I noticed the same thing with Cisco vulns a while back. How many times do you hard code credentials before it becomes an intentional backdoor rather than negligence?
It is more the corporate culture on how security is treated . Sure it is might convenient for NSA who probably use it when it is found , but is less likely that company of cisco size can intentionally do something like that coordinated and keep it secret too.
Perhaps only companies of Cisco size are useful to the NSA, otherwise they have too many errands to run in order to manage companies' PRISM hooks.