logoalt Hacker News

znpyyesterday at 3:23 PM2 repliesview on HN

I always assumed this to be true, to be honest.

Nowadays all of the messaging pipeline on my phone is closed source and proprietary, and thus unverifiable at all.

The iPhone operating system is closed, the runtime is closed, the whatsapp client is closed, the protocol is closed… hard to believe any claim.

And i know that somebody’s gonna bring up the alleged e2e encryption… a client in control of somebody else might just leak the encryption keys from one end of the chat.

Closed systems that do not support third party clients that connect through open protocols should ALWAYS be assumed to be insecure.


Replies

gruezyesterday at 6:57 PM

>Closed systems that do not support third party clients that connect through open protocols should ALWAYS be assumed to be insecure.

So you're posting this from an open core CPU running on an open FPGA that you fabricated yourself, right? Or is this just a game of one-upmanship where people come with increasingly high standards for what counts as "secure" to signal how devoted to security they are?

solenoid0937yesterday at 4:23 PM

it doesn't need to be open source for us to know what it's doing. its properties are well understood by the security community because it's been RE'd.

> a client in control of somebody else might just leak the encryption keys from one end of the chat.

has nothing to do with closed/open source. preventing this requires remote attestation. i don't know of any messaging app out there that really does this, closed or open source.

also, ironically remote attestation is the antithesis of open source.