this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024

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259

WhatsApp and Signal messages at risk of surveillance following EncroChat ruling, court hears | Computer Weekly (www.computerweekly.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 80 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Stop promoting "just trust me bro software" in the same title.

Anti-libre software, WhatsApp, bans us from proving its E2EE claims, any claims. It bans us from forking its source code, removing backdoors. It fails to include a libre software license text file, like AGPL, so they control it, not us. WhatsApp, anti-libre software, is a scam.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 9 months ago (6 children)

Wonder how they'd manage that as they both are E2EE.

[–] [email protected] 54 points 9 months ago (2 children)

A French and Dutch Joint Investigation Team (JIT) harvested more than 115 million supposedly encrypted messages from an estimated 60,000 users of EncroChat phones after infecting the handsets with a software “implant”.

Looks like they just hack the phone

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EncroChat

So this sounds like the ANOM phone story with extra steps?

I get that they can "access" messages, but the headline feels misleading if it requires full access to the device.

It's not that they're breaking encryption or reading messages in transit, it's more like they're installing malware on specific devices so that they can look at your screen?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Because truth is more complex and does nor drive clicks. so far every time we see signal in a headline like this, it will generally be "cops had physically access" "no password" or "password leaked"

ie something that encryption is not designed to defend against.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

How does one get an "implant" onto a phone?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago

You implant it, duh.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Apparently what happened is that French police installed some of malware on the phones to read the messages, and this was now decided to be legal in the UK.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Damn, we'll need those linux phones working soon.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Then they enforce the chipmakers to put backdoors in the chips themselves

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I'd wager they already have

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

For x86 platforms it’s called Intel ME and AMD PSP.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

What would that change?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You'd have enough control over the software that you can ensure nothing like this happens

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

The basic security stuff exists on Android and iOS as well, namely full disk encryption. When that is defeated through a missing or bad password nothing keeps them from installing their malware with device access.

If they got in through an external security vulnerabilities in some software package the situation is also the same on either OS.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Honestly mentioning Enchrochat together with other mainstream message clients is kind of misleading. The Enchrochat message client was also E2EE. However Enchrochat was also a company that sold their own mobile phones with a prorietary OS on it together with own sim cards and only those phones were able to connect to each other. And law enforcment had enough evidence that they sold those hardware in shady untracable ways similar to drugs. At that point there was no western government that didn't want to help seizing their infrastructure and taking over their update services for example.

The bigger problem however for the general public is that certain politicians want to break encryption all together by forcing companies to implement backdoors on client side. This has been an ongoing discussion for 2 years in EU parliament and it has to stop: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/now-eu-council-should-finally-understand-no-one-wants-chat-control

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

With a warrant they could probably force signal/whatsapp to inject Malware into their apps to spy on users.

Don't know how possible it is with signal and their reproducible builds. They would need to add this to the source code of the app.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Could they though, I thought signal would just leave the market

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Especially with Signal being open source. What stops the official Signal company from advertising another fork?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The server software is not open source.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Untrue. Stop spreading FUD: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Server

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (2 children)

There's a grain of truth in the claim: We don't know for sure if the original open source version is actually running on the server.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Isn't that true of all server side FOSS?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Yes. We just have to trust them. Or selfhost, which I'm doing with almost everything.

[+] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Why not use eg. Matrix then?

[+] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

we already had XMPP available and well developed.

XMPP as defined where?

For privacy, I guess OMEMO is the current gold standard regarding XMPP; however, agreeing on a feature set between clients apart from the most basic stuff wasn't always easy (and I guess it still isn't).

Also, I guess XML has fallen out of style for this kind of use case. Matrix is just JSON over REST, which I guess is kind of nice nowadays?

XML kind of suffers the jack of all trades curse. If you just have two sides exchanging messages using a well-defined protocol, why go for something that offers schema definition, DTD, XSL transformation? These come with costs, and if you don't use them, why XML in the first place?

All of this combined with the fact that the communication model of XMPP and Matrix is different - XMPP closer to email where a server relays messages between clients while in Matrix, everything is a synchronized (?) room, even direct messages between two participants - would have required bending or extending the spec so much that it wouldn't have been XMPP in the original spirit anyways. So instead, a new protocol was designed that incorporated a lot of lessons learned in the decade before it.

You're free to continue using XMPP, after all, bridges exist.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

They've said that they release the source code after it's running in production:

sorry the source for one of our services was so far behind. We often don't push source until we release things, and there were a few overlapping releases that happened in that period which made it awkward to push at any moment and put us behind. Additionally, we've seen a large increase in spam, and a reluctance to immediately publish the exact anti-spam measures we were responding with to a place where spammers could immediately see them combined with the above to cause this extreme delay.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/issues/11101#issuecomment-815400676

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago

In that case: They started publishing code AGAIN.

The server soft has been available, then not, and apparently now again.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That'd be irrelevant, because as long as only the clients hold the keys (which we can verify, as those are not only open source but also are under our control, meaning we can check that the upstream open source version is installed and no private keys are being exchanged) there's no way anyone can read the messages, except the owner of the private key.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Messages - yes, but there is also metadata. When ALL communication goes through the same servers, it becomes kind of a problem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

"Gruyere Signal"

[+] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

WhatsApp has MITM on the server side which is how Facebook scans your messages for targeted advert

You shouldn't make claims like this when there is no evidence for it.

Signal which (unless they changed something with the profiles thing) was always P2P E2E

Signal has never been P2P.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Whatsapp uses the same protocol as signal so MITM is unlikely however there's no way to know what happens before or after the messages are encrypted/decrypted and sent. They can do that scanning at that stage.

That is different than Signal which (unless they changed something with the profiles thing) was always P2P E2EE. You’re sending encrypted messages directly to the other persons phone, not to a server.

Sender cannot know where the recipient is and using P2P would be resource consuming on all client devices (i.e. everyone who uses Signal) so I guess the messages are routed thru Signal's servers though messages are encrypted on device with keys that only the messaging parties know (couldn't find an official diagram for this to confirm).

[–] [email protected] 23 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Meta has all the power here. WhatsApp is ubiquitous in the EU. If they just shut it down, so many systems would be utterly fucked. They have to walk it back.

But I'm sure they don't have the balls and don't care, they'd just point at the gov and say "they made us do it!" while collecting all your message info and exploiting it for profit.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (2 children)

UK... Not EU... Haven't you heard of Brexit? They wouldn't be allowed to do shit like that in the EU.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (3 children)

Listen. I'm American. You can't expect me to keep up with all the incredibly confusing regions and governments over there.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Upvoted you because I'm an euro and I still kinda agree with you. If Texas secedes, I have no idea what the implications are for legislation and court cases. It's like half the size of the UK by population and 3x as big by area.

Sure everyone heard of brexit, but I'm sure many outside of the EU don't know what it really is plus it took so damn long I honestly believed it might not even happen.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (4 children)

If Texas secedes, they can have fun on their own with their kangaroo court politics.

Truth be told, if Texas were to actually succeed in seceding, it would likely lead to a domino effect of other southern states following suit, and a royal fracturing of the US. How that plays out is anyone's guess.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

If we have a war, will you be able to keep up then?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 months ago

Nope.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The EU is literally trying to do it right now: https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/19/24181214/eu-chat-control-law-propose-scanning-encrypted-messages-csam

[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

afaik that law got snuffed out

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago

For now, maybe.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Can someone explain how this is even possible with a service like Signal? I was under the impression that encrypted messages can't be intercepted.

Extremely frustrating either way, I hate constantly having to manage different messaging services with different people and I'd really like to not have to add one more if signal becomes compromised.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

It’s all client side. It even mentions infected clients.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Anything on the signal protocol could have an infected cilent be delivered, or backdoor server side by providing the wrong keys.

Facebook might comply. Would guess that Signal would refuse and would be hit by some absurd fee like 100mil a day for not complying and be forced to pull their services out of the UK.

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