Since What'sApp uses textsecure, can we be sure that they are blind to the content of our messages? Is there any way for them to get the key, still claim it's e2e encrypted, except for when they want to hand the key over to various states etc?
- even if they have implemented it faithfully, you should compare fingerprints. If they don't line up, you might be subject to a MITM attack
2. Yes.
Or indeed if it were a patch that could be initiated as forced update at will from the server-side, again that would be clear to "people" based on the client side binary?
These are the ways I imagine I'd snoop on supposed end-to-end encrypted communication channels; there's probably something much cleverer, but again, we're saying that can be detected easily?
Genuine questions, not a programmer, not familiar with the state-of-the-art of reading machine code/interpreting network traffic, nor indeed with which watchdogs are guarding against abuse by the TLAs.
Its not hard to imagine how WA could be compromised without anyone knowing for many years.
Do you have any response to the substantive point or just quibbles on the semantics.
That is, those who read WhatsApp disassembly and did thourough enough review to warrant with sufficient confidence not raising any flags. It would also help to know which specific build the were looking at.
As it stands, average people (or average developers) have little incentive to go trawling through the existing body of open source code, mostly because they probably have better things to do with their time. In the commercial world, bug bounties attempt to skew the incentives to encourage the 'more eyes' part of the axiom 'given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow'.
And I'm pretty sure bug bounties would apply to shellshock and heartbleed as long as you can find a company with a bounty program that also used openssl or could be exploited via bash.
What you and other assembly verification supporters are proposing is an assembly version of the many eyeballs hypothesis. The idea that many people that are qualified could see it means they thoroughly analyzed it in a way that implied actual security results. I see little to no evidence of that. Actually, I see the opposite where malware hits binary systems in many ways that were easily preventable at source or assembly. That assumption means I don't trust the claim that assembly being verifiable means that it was likely verified. More like stockpiled into a 0-day collection.
You also can't trust something to be correct, reliable, and secure with assembly or binary alone. If you could, high-assurance field would be all over that. Instead, the evidence indicated the source... esp if requirements were encoded as formal policy... had more information to work with to analyze potential compromises and information leaks. A lot gets lost in producing assembly. So, they instead analyze source for correctness in all states of execution for various properties then verify that assembly does same thing with some proof supplied to evaluators and/or customers. Much more trustworthy. Also almost non-existent for proprietary or FOSS software.
I would argue that reading source code is much easier, though. For example, if you are auditing code written in a memory-safe language, you don't need to look for memory corruption bugs. You also have an audit trail for all source code changes.
[1] https://reproducible-builds.org
[2] https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-iOS/issues/641
[3] https://f-droid.org/wiki/page/Deterministic,_Reproducible_Bu...
Beyond that, despite the repeated claims of open source advocates, there's nothing preventing people from taking the app store versions of things like WhatsApp and reverse engineering them.
So, while being open source is not the complete answer, it certainly doesn't hurt.
I don't think we have good solutions for the problem of malicious updates in general.
The only one I can think of is a trusted hypervisor that hashes memory in the guest and reports on it. And even then, how do we trust that?
So what do you do? It comes back to making sure that 'they' can only hack some of the people all the time, and all of the people some of the time. It's preventing them hacking all the people all the time I worry about.
However, open source does give users some real recourse in the event that the project moves in an undesirable direction. I don't like what's happening, I can fork it without your permission and still have access to the same development environment and build tools the original project had. I think that's important and valuable.
I can read a commented Python or BASIC program with almost no effort unless it's very sloppy. I can tell you a MISRA C or SPARK program with associated static checks is immune to entire classes of errors without analyzing the source myself. I can tell you what information flows can or can't happen in a language like SIF implementing information-flow security. I can do all of this while expending almost no effort. So, I'm much more likely to do it than if I had to decompile and reverse-engineer a binary from scratch with analyses using the tiny information in a binary.
So, every time you say that, what you're really saying is: "Anyone could do this if they spent enormous time and energy. Sort of like they could hand-compile their C code each iteration. They probably won't but I'm countering your wanting for source because in theory they could do all this with assembly with enough effort."
It's definitely not true for correctness as assembly lacks what you need to know it's correct. It's probably not true for security as correctness is a prerequisite for it. In any case, economics is important where the effort required to achieve a thing determines whether someone will likely spend that effort. In case of binary analysis, it's apparently a lot less than source analysis.