161–170 of 352 posts
Truly a jaw dropping blog post, as the top comment currently states, Apple may be legally required to at the very least, comment on this situation.
"Required" to comment? By whom and for what reason?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the one thing worse than boasting that you're putting malware in your product is boasting about it and not doing it.
They are not putting malware into their app. They are adding athletically pleasing files to their app. Is it Signals fault if someone else's software doesn't work properly with them? How can Signal test every piece of software to make sure it's compatible with their own software? Especially when the other software is using Signal in a unintended way. It's not signals job to secure 3rd party software, that's entirely…
It's not Signal's job to secure third party software, they can intentionally post incompatible data, but it definitely is their job (just as everyone else's, mandated by criminal law) to abstain from any activities that would tamper with evidence. If that incompatible data isn't limited to randomness or crashes but contains, quoting the article "a file that executes arbitrary code on the Cellebrite machine" or "undetectably alter previous reports, compromise the integrity of future reports (perhaps at random!), or exfiltrate data from the Cellebrite machine" then it obviously was intentionally made that way, which crosses the line and at that point yes, it's definitely Signal's fault. If that gets actually executed on a machine owned not by Signal but e.g. some law enforcement agency, then Signal and any involved developers personally may face criminal charges.
It does not even need to involve any computer specific laws (though those are also likely to apply) - if there's an incident where evidence got disrupted, if there's evidence that this incident was caused by "aesthetically pleasing files" developed by Signal, and there's some evidence (e.g. this blogpost) that they made these files knowing that they might result in other evidence being destroyed - that's completely enough, that's tampering with evidence, a felony. Go directly to jail, do not collect $200, don't expect sympathy from law enforcement and the legal system.
In my personal opinion this is all FUD and scaremongering, because actually doing so carries little benefit and high risk for Signal. But, of course, no one can be sure.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the one thing worse than boasting that you're putting malware in your product is boasting about it and not doing it.
Is it malware if users desire for their devices to be resistant to surveillance tools?
If you can't figure out a way to satisfy your desire for your devices to be resistant to surveillance tools with legal means, well, then you can't satisfy that desire.
Furthermore, not only the ends don't justify the means, the ends can be prohibited too - if you explicitly design something to destroy your own data knowing that this data would get used in a criminal investigation, that may be a crime on its own (tampering with evidence/obstruction of justice, location matters of course); you don't have to testify against yourself, but destroying evidence is a crime even if it's your property (e.g. throwing your gun into a river after a shooting so it wouldn't be found) and furthermore in that case the court may be allowed to assume that the destroyed evidence was unfavorable to you, that the data contained the damning things they expected to find there - so if you want to protect your devices from surveillance tools operated with a legal warrant, you might want to consult a lawyer to find out if that's a good idea in your jurisdiction, it may well be worse for you than doing nothing.
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…
The reason I want e2e encryption is because I want control of my devices, control of my information, control of what's going on. It's not Moxie's phone to drop random files on to, regardless of purpose. It's my phone, and I consider programs that are doing things that I'm not aware of malware.
(Admittedly, Android is rife with stuff I don't want going on, so it's not really my phone, it's Google's and Motorola's and a bunch of other entities who have their tentacles in it, but still...)
Maybe the last paragraph is a joke, and they have no intention of randomly placing files on unwitting client machines. It's open source, so I could compile the client myself and make sure it's not doing anything funny. What a pain though. At that point, so much trust is lost in the organization and codebase that really I need to find some other messaging protocol / app / network.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software. I wish I could see those files in action...
I wonder if the intention here is to deter Cellebrite from parsing Signal files? Or to pressure them into fixing their security vulnerabilities?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it, can anyone elaborate on what they are talking about there?
Signal is going to start attacking third-party tools once it's installed on your phone. It's as though Theo decided that OpenSSH should respond to portscanners by trying to pwn the source systems.
More realistically it is like dropping a file on your private file server DONT_RUN_THIS_BLOWS_UP_YOUR_COMPUTER.exe. You never run it, but maybe somebody exploits your file server, gets all your files, and automatically runs them?
Oh well.
This is truly a hacker’s retort. It attacks Cellebrite's ability to operate by casting doubt on the reports generated by the product that their customers may wish to use in court. It places them in legal peril from Apple, and removes any cover Apple would have to not take legal action. (I assume someone at Apple knew they were shipping their DLLs?) It makes a thinly-veiled threat that any random Signal user's data ma…
CoreFoundation is open source: https://github.com/opensource-apple/CF
libdispatch is open source: https://apple.github.io/swift-corelibs-libdispatch/post/libd...
ASL is open source: https://opensource.apple.com/source/syslog/syslog-349.1.1/li...
The objective C runtime is open source: https://github.com/opensource-apple/objc4/blob/master/APPLE_...
icu, pthread, zlib, and libxml did not even originate at Apple.