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Comment by camhart | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing here, but wouldn't they just push the e2ee message through APNS? Then decrypt client side. Or does Apple require plaintext messages for push notifications (that seems bad if they do)?

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When you craft a push notification server-side, it contains the payload in plaintext. Now, that is probably encrypted in Apple-land, but my point is that the gov't probably has sunk its teeth into Apple already. So, yea signal's encryption may be open source and proven, but I doubt Apple's doesn't have a backdoor.

Not sure if Signal is doing this, but they could send a notification with title "New message" and encrypted payload. The payload can be processed by a client-side notification extension which decrypts the payload and chooses what notification text the user will see.

I mean Apple themselves is telling devs to not send sensitive data in the actual notification

> [...] never include sensitive data or data that can be retrieved by other means in your payload. Instead, use notifications to alert the user to new information or as a signal that your app has data waiting for it.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Ne...

that’s why Signal sends an empty notification then uses their own EE2E for notification wordings.

Not true. The server can send encrypted (not plaintext) payload. The client can then use a NotificationExtension to decrypt the payload as it comes in.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/usernotifications/...

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