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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

A while back I asked HN if there was any way I could trust an iOS keepass client. The answer was no, on the basis that you have no way of auditing whether the open source code built what’s in the App Store. Nor is there a way of preventing a rogue keepass client app from accessing the internet and exfiltrating your database and password.

Has any of that changed recently?

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Wouldn't this be true for any open source application you don't compile from the source?

There's something called deterministic compilation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_compilation

Debian is trying to get reproducible builds for their packages.

I don't know enough about iOS to say anything about that.

How does that help if you aren't compiling?

Because someone you trust can compile and verify that the source they audited matches the binary you got from the app store.

So how do you do this in practice? Do you just send some guy (that you trust!) hashes of all the files on your system and hope that he spots the backdoored binary soon enough?

Perhaps there's some false assumption there that the "app store" will serve everyone a backdoored binary, instead of performing almost undetectable targeted attacks.

What's stopping you from compiling the source on mac?

Ostensibly because then you'd have to deploy it yourself to the iOS device - which is fine for your iPhone but not so easy for your parents' iPads across the country/world.

The fact that I don’t have a Mac.

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