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by cqqxo4zV46cp
927 days ago
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No. This is an entirely self-centred view. The only people that equate this sort of transparency with genuine security are computer nerds. These tend to be the sorts of people that don’t sit very highly on my internal list of “people who stand to benefit the most from increased privacy measures”. For…literally every other member of society, this sort of implementation detail doesn’t mean anything^. They hear some (from their perspective) very abstract words like ‘open’, and all that means is that they’re trusting some league of computer nerds to tell them that something is ‘secure’. This is somehow meant to be more convincing than Apple, who, to most people, is at the very least another mob of computer nerds, but in reality also happen to have a pretty good track record of making phones that seem to work alright for people. Beyond optics, let’s just look at attack surface. The implication that the sort of security holes that “openness” would fix are anywhere near the top of the list is…where’s that xkcd about cryptography and crowbars? It’s very clearly in the realm of nerdy cosplay. You know what is* a much more realistic threat? Some stupid third-party client on the Play store that exfiltrates all messages sent and received. Apple has absolutely no control over that. No protocol security accounts for that. |
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One way to avoid that outcome would be to have a first-party client on the Play store.
Instead, Apple drops all message security entirely from cross-platform communications for iOS users, allowing anyone to read those messages whether or not they have a crowbar. This is security 101: users do dangerous crap when the secure options don't have affordances for their use-cases. Users are lazy. If an official 1st-party secure client exists that meets their needs, they won't install a 3rd-party client. Users resort to dangerous and unsupported options when the safe, obvious options either don't work or aren't available.
And thankfully, we now know that it would be entirely possible for Apple to fix that problem and to move its own users off of SMS for communication with Android contacts, and we know that because a 16 year-old high-schooler was able to build that support with zero documentation. Presumably Apple is capable of doing the work of a 16 year-old. We now know that it would in fact be entirely possible for Apple using a 1st-party controlled, proprietary client with a proprietary protocol, to encrypt virtually every message that Apple users send to every one of their contacts, rather than what Apple does today where it encrypts... some of them.
None of this requires Apple to Open Source anything or to document or make available any of their protocols. The only reason Apple is in this position right now of needing to deal with 3rd-party clients is because of a lack of support from their 1st-party client.