Sadly I suspect the people in law enforcement who make purchasing decisions never read the Signal blog, and therefore all these points will be moot.
They won't be moot when defense lawyers bring them up.
Doesn't matter. When you can go through every message on someones phone back for years, I'm sure you can find something to put nearly anyone in prison for.
No need to tell the court how you found out about the lawnmowing for the neighbour that was never reported to the IRS...
> sandbox the entire tool. Sandboxing doesn't really help. The problem isn't that the tool is used to infect the rest of the system, but that the tool itself is compromised, the reports it generates are compromised, and and past reports may be compromised. Unless you're pushing that data outside the sandbox (which is a hole in the sandbox, and while much more limited might also be an exploit vector or a way to cause…
This is too quick a dismissal: if they sandboxed each extraction tool they'd be more likely to be able to say that a compromised tool did not compromise the entire system or data collected by other tools. This is exactly why programs like browsers, messaging clients, etc. have moved things like media decoders into separate processes, especially since those tools can be sandboxed quite aggressively whereas a monolithi…
Sure, sandboxing all the individual components and not just the whole would help. That's not what was being suggested though, and is a significantly more complex and labor intensive task than even just fixing all the the included libraries to be more recent and not have known exploits (even thought it would pay dividends later). I wasn't dismissing sandboxing as an effective tool, just noting that it's likely not all that effective to put it all in one sandbox as suggested (and since actually fixing all the problems is likely a lot of work, it doesn't negate the effectiveness of the strategy of Signal by providing an easy solution to the problem).
A reminder that you can pair lock your iPhone to prevent analysis by Cellebrite or similar tools: https://arkadiyt.com/2019/10/07/pair-locking-your-iphone-wit...
All of these are based on the assumption that the attacker has physical access to the unlocked phone, right? I'm trying to understand the risk profile here. I guess I see the value for, e.g., a border crossing, where they can inconvenience you and ask you to unlock your phone, but instead of flicking through your messages briefly, they authorize a pairing and quickly backup your entire disk content. You expected a qu…
> if I were compelled via court order to give my passcode
In the US that won't work if unlocking the device requires a password or pin. In practice, you can't be compelled to provide that unless you openly admit that you know it. (Even then, the 5th amendment might afford you some protection.) YMMV, IANAL, etc.
Signal isn't going to actually do it, they know how that would end, they're just playing the FUD game in the other direction. Which I am 100% on board with.
The client code is open source, so it should be pretty easy to tell if they actually do it.
I would assume their aesthetically pleasing files would not be part of their client code since the clients are fetching these files from Signal.
So whether they're fetching aesthetically pleasing files would be easy to tell, but trickier to tell if those files actually have payload.
All of these are based on the assumption that the attacker has physical access to the unlocked phone, right? I'm trying to understand the risk profile here. I guess I see the value for, e.g., a border crossing, where they can inconvenience you and ask you to unlock your phone, but instead of flicking through your messages briefly, they authorize a pairing and quickly backup your entire disk content. You expected a qu…
> if I were compelled via court order to give my passcode In the US that won't work if unlocking the device requires a password or pin. In practice, you can't be compelled to provide that unless you openly admit that you know it. (Even then, the 5th amendment might afford you some protection.) YMMV, IANAL, etc.
IANAL but AFAIK you can be held in contempt of court if you don't provide it when asked if they're already convinced it's yours and has incriminating evidence on it. Article below, although it looks like fairly recent (not super established) jurisprudence.
They are more advanced typically than just extracting data from a phone. Not sure to which extent they advertise it brazenly though. Fairly certain they blog about it a lot
the cellebrite ambassador we talked to (as private company) basically bragged they were the ones that unlocked the San Bernadirno iPhone. I'm sure towards government officials and Law Enforcement they brag even more.
Yeah, that wasn't them... so whoever that was lied
Nah. The cost/benefit of saber rattling makes tons of sense while the cost/benefit of actually doing it makes much less sense. Probably. No amount of certainty about Marlinspike's actions should comfort Cellebrite, though, because Moxie Marlinspike isn't the only person allowed on the app store.
I’m not sure what you mean. The end of the post pretty clearly describes the framework they’re using to roll out these exploits as latent files within the Signal app.
The end of the post is extremely specifically and carefully not describing a framework for rolling out files to exploit these vulnerabilities; those files as described do nothing, and serve only aesthetic purposes. While it's easy to read that as a wink that they are exploiting the vulnerabilities they found while maintaining plausible deniability that they aren't, it's equally possible it's the other way around: they aren't rolling out exploits but want people reading the blog post to believe that they are. Or that they want to lay out the framework so that others can do so, but aren't actually going to follow through themselves. As written it's essentially unverifiable, obviously on purpose.
They won't be moot when defense lawyers bring them up.
Doesn't matter. When you can go through every message on someones phone back for years, I'm sure you can find something to put nearly anyone in prison for. No need to tell the court how you found out about the lawnmowing for the neighbour that was never reported to the IRS...
This is pretty irksome. I get how satisfying it must feel, but the one thing I want as a Signal proponent is for the app to be boring and reliable. That means make it easy to use enough to be mainstream, squash bugs, and do all the lovely security work you do. That does not mean adding stuff like untraceable cryptocurrency payments or very publicly tweaking the noses of law enforcement, and bragging about how you're…
I think there's a chance the two topics you mention might be connected. The loud backlash to the cryptocurrency scheme took many by surprise and seeded doubt about Moxie's ideological commitment. This post might be seen as an attempt to recover some street cred.