A small way to reduce attack surface - have iMessage just setup for your iCloud email address instead of phone number. Phone numbers are becoming increasingly useless. > In fact, Citizen Lab researchers and others suggest that Apple should simply provide an option to disable iMessage entirely. There's a checkbox in Settings > Messages that does exactly this? It seems strange they published this.
"... Citizen Lab researchers and others suggest that Apple should simply provide an option to disable iMessage entirely." You can do this already. If you "manage" your iphone with Apple Configurator you have fine-grained control over every little thing it does. You can disable imessage (and many other things like the app store, etc.)
You can disable iMessage just by going into the Settings and turning the “iMessage” toggle to off. You don’t need to supervise the device or install a profile.
I turned off imessage. I seem to be under attack lately. 3-4 times a day random links sent from gmail addresses or unknown phone numbers to imsg with sketchy looking links in them.
So enlighten us: how did you turn off iMessage?
“Settings” -> “Messages” -> Toggle “iMessage” to off. Couldn’t be simpler.
It is a convenience difficult to live without I can give you that. But so many other services we can't imagine living without require a cellular number. Accepting a flawed authentication mechanism and legal but abusive privacy breaches is what have kept them up and running. This threat demonstrates how difficult it is to keep us safe from hacks. We can keep our bank account and one day have to deal with fraud recover…
Banks can and do rollback fraud and theft in most cases; that’s the advantage of working in a system supported by law and regulation. The alternative is trusting that every component in your crypto tech stack has perfect security (which is impossible) or else risk losing all your money in a manner that can’t be reversed. I’ll choose banks, thanks.
And that's fine, the majority of the current generation will stick to traditional banking out of fear. Maybe it is safer that way you are right. Let's not ignore the fact the crypto technology is actually safer as a whole, the method of transaction is order of magnitudes more hardened with private keys and signatures, and also more flexible.
BTW cryptocurrencies and also smart contract networks does support rollback as shown in the Eth vulnerability that was exploited years ago. The irreversibility is a feature. We figured it is safer to adopt a push approach to transactions like when paying with cash rather than a pull approach used with debit/credit card, and that making the transaction not reversible leads to less fear from the creditor and promote fluidity. If reversibility is desired, multi sig and escrow exist. They are as rarely used as on eBay, because for most transactions we don't care. Nothing is perfectly safe you are right but humanity, despite stickiness to what is tolerable has always eventually adopted less understood but more enabling technologies when they prove to be superior in so many respects.
On device? The vast majority of people don't give a flying fuck about privacy, for them the decrease in battery life would not be worth it
so we should get rid of all security features then? No memory management, no code signing, no HTTPS, no certificate pinning? Vierualisation has a negligible impact on power consumption.
What? How did you derive "we should get rid of all security features" from my reply? I'm saying your idea of using virtualization on-device is not feasible due to the power envelope available vs customer demands.
Still hard to understand. If it’s just image preview code, why isn’t Safari vulnerable?
It's not exactly specific to the image preview code, but rather the code that handles the notification when receiving an iMessage.
The attack mentioned in the Wired article[1] relies on iMessage asking the sandboxless Springboard[2][3] to deserialize a maliciously crafted field, included in the incoming iMessage, to escape the sandbox. This specific vulnerability doesn't appear to apply to other apps.
iMessage is one of few apps that have broad permissions to execute code in response to notifications. For other apps like Telegram; the server can send a predefined notification message. For iMessage, when you get something even from someone outside your contacts, its daemon invokes specific code to handle the message, and its attachments. Whilst this doesn't help if someone opens the app, it does at least change thi…
So, in theory other messaging apps have the same vulnerabilities, but I’d have to open the message to get burnt?
No. This attack is specific to iMessage, since iMessage can access the springboard (the singleton class, not Springboad.app), while apps downloaded from the App Store cannot.