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Comment by zanny | Hacker News Reader

Signal has open source clients and server. Matrix has crypto support now (needs more auditing, but you can turn it on and nobody has cracked it yet to my knowledge) and thats fully open source.

No, open source does not guarantee they are using the secure algorithms advertised on their servers. But open source does is let you run your own server, that you can put much more trust in. People spin up their own signal and matrix servers all the time now for just that reason.

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But Apple isn't in that business, they are trying to make common user's comm private. Open sourcing only helps the power user (audit, run their own), as you described.

Signal and iMessage both don't guarantee true privacy as we can't see the servers.

Any system where you don't control every component of that system is inherently insecure. I find it laughable that so many (especially on HN) will evangelize security while evangelizing Google, a company that literally wrote the book on and perfected the art of harvesting user data and selling it to advertisers, while tearing down Apple just because Apple refuses to let us see their code.

No service that uses a third party server can guarantee privacy unless they let you see the servers.

For common users the question is if you trust the server operator, and if not, to consider your communications insecure. What they do about that is up to them. And it is up to these providers to earn trust.

The problem with this is that it eliminates the value proposition of E2EE, which is designed specifically to protect you when you don't trust the server operator. If you already trust the server operator, you've obviated the issue that E2EE ostensibly solves.

> No service that uses a third party server can guarantee privacy unless they let you see the servers.

And there are no services that do that. Since that doesn't seem to be possible. Open sourcing the backend doesn't help here since you still have to blindly trust the server operators.

Personally I can't trust apple for a specific reason... On iOS they've made it quite difficult to turn location services off unless you jailbreak the device itself. You have to go into settings -> privace -> locations -> on - off -> are you sure you want to do it? -> yes ....

I mean when a company does that, it makes it pretty clear that they do want to monitor your location, making it annoying for you to turn it on and off.

How is that difficult to turn off?

The steps, I am a privacy junkie myself and I want to have location services off most of the time, apart from when am gonna use uber or gmaps. Even for me that I'd go the extra mile to turn it off, it just puts me off that you have to go through so many steps to do it.

Not sure what you exactly want from Apple here. Nobody other than a handful of people are regularly switching Location Services on or off. Especially at a global level as opposed to at the app level.

And even then it's only 4 taps. Which is 1 more tap than what's involved in changing WiFi networks something a lot of people do.

Well on Android it's just a swipe down on the system bar (or whatever it's called) and a tap--from anywhere. So yes of course people are constantly turning it on and off, mainly because it saves loads of battery, but also the obvious privacy reasons.

Open sourcing helps everybody. Power users make sure its save for them, if it is, it is save for 'normal' users as well.

I don't need to read Signal code to have confidence in its working.

OK so if your tech-inclined friend sets up a Signal server, for little to nothing in return, that's automatically more trustworthy than a multi-billion dollar corporation with an ingrained and (seemingly) solid attitude regarding NOT selling user's data?

I roll an OwnCloud server for me and my family, and I know that I'm not invading their privacy, but I could very easily do so and not leave a trace of my having done it even that a pro user could find, let alone a layman. To say that Apple is less trustworthy than a given power user solely because they use closed source is ridiculous, there is zero correlation there.

> Power users make sure its save for them, if it is, it is save for 'normal' users as well.

Power users can make sure the code they're running is safe for them. There's no guarantee that Signal for example is running the same code they release to others.

Signal for Android has reproducible builds, so you can verify that the version on the Play Store matches the code you audited.

How does that help you verify what is running on the server?

The whole point of e2e is that you don't have to trust the server (for content; you do have to trust that they aren't saving metadata).

They can use trusted computing or HSM tech for that. They have the money but probably won't spend it.

None of that addresses the point. Without third party, independent verification of their servers and the code that is running open source provides limited (if any) improvements to privacy and security.

That's part of the point rather than separate. A closed system without any way to prove it's running something often can't to get 3rd party verification or user trust that's consistently believable. An open-source, tamper-resistant system can. Quite a bit of difference. Once verifications come in, the effects of reputation then allow users with less technical knowledge to learn what's trustworthy or not.

But they don't, so why do they get points for having an open source server?

For a full solution, it would be a start to what they needed. The main benefit of an open-source server is that people can audit it for vulnerabilities. As in, they get free to cheap labor to reduce their liabilities. People might also submit extensions they find useful. The usual benefits of FOSS for suppliers.

"...if it is, it is save for 'normal' users as well..."

Not sure about that. I think even if a power user were to say "this is safe", you still have a boatload of integrity problems with the software.

-How do we know the power users can be trusted?

-Even if they can, what guarantee do we have that the service provider we use is using the same open source code that the power user validated?

-Etc, etc, etc. Basically, a lot of trust issues.

I agree with asadlionpk, open source can generally only be proven to help power users in a trustless environment. And where security is concerned, we cannot ascribe the "safe" attribute to any system where that safety cannot be proven.

>both don't guarantee true privacy as we can't see the servers.

What do you define as true privacy? Why isn't other privacy "true"?

What do you mean by "see the servers"? Surely you can see them as computers at the other end of a TCP connection, and the server cannot read the cleartext of an E2E encrypted message.

Helping the power user is the whole point imo: let those who know what they're doing see and run the code themselves. As such, it doesn't matter whether Apple is in some business or not, it's simply a security measure.

That's what I am trying to say, "Helping the power user" is not the business Apple is in.

I guess we're going to find out soon enough what Apple thinks of that demographic considering their WWDC announcements.

And how is open source a guarantee of better security? The SSL Heartbleed bug was in the wild for over a year

If you try to make a Signal-compatible server you'll be pushed out of business though. It's shared source, not open source.

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