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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

Push notifications are such a great way to spy on people, because so many apps send highly private information as push notification. Even if you install them on-premise, because the only well-supported battery-friendly way to send notifications is through Google's and Apple's servers.

The most serious of secure messengers moved to push notifications that just cause the app to wake up and fetch the real message from the server to show as notification, but there are still plenty of apps that just send the full message as push notification.

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As far as I know, WhatsApp on iOS uses a special entitlement (com.apple.developer.usernotifications.filtering) for securely handling notifications.

They receive silent push notifications, which wake up the app (a reason for the entitlement being restricted). Once awake, the app takes over, managing the notification itself.

This approach circumvents sending notification content in cleartext through Apple's servers, thereby preserving their end-to-end encryption.

> Even if you install them on-premise,

You mean on-premises? If so, please show me where I can download and run my own APNS servers on my own hardware, because such a thing does not exist. You can run your own workers, which send through APNS/apple's servers, but there is no such way you can own the entire chain to get a push from your backends to a apple device, not if you're using native push notifications.

AFAIK, google isn't any better, with GCM, and even firebase use that from what I know.

What are the most serious secure messengers?

Signal

I personally like the approach Threema has. They provide their own push serice called Threema Push[1] which is opt-in for google play store version. The push notifications for Threema do not contain any sensitve information either way.[2] They also have a libre version on F-Droid.

[1]https://threema.ch/en/faq/threema_push

[2]https://threema.ch/en/faq/privacy_push

Threema may very well be the Crypto AG of our times

Why would you say that? It's open source and has reproducible builds

Play Store version could be anything

i fail to see how the play store version could be "anything" considering you can reproduce the builds. can you enlighten me how something like this would be possible?

You can reproduce the builds yourself but you have no control over what happens to the app APK once it is uploaded to Google then distributed via the Play Store. I suppose you could checksum the APK before and after and make sure your app is exactly the same before and after sending it to Google to distribute via the Play Store. Google doesn't have much motivation TODAY to mess with APKs directly since they have Google Play Services which is essentially a rootkit running on your phone all the time and it is easily accessible by the NSA through Google's infrastructure, probably by a secret FISA warrant with a gag order. Maybe they don't need a warrant. Think we would ever find out?

I think I am still missing what you are referring to. The guide on Threema's site promts you to extract the APK from your phone via adb which you then `diff -r` with the locally compiled version. [1] As far as I am aware it does not matter whether Google or Threema modified the APK before uploading it to the Play Store since you would notice either way.

[1]https://threema.ch/en/open-source/reproducible-builds

That works as long as you always check after each update.

I agree with you. That's the case with every software project.

Their web client is based on angular.js - i wouldn't dare trust it with private information.

I'm not a huge expert on web frameworks. Can you clarify your concerns?

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