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Comment by eastbound | Hacker News Reader

Is there an exception for emergency purposes?

If it's done right, it can't be subverted in case of "emergency" can it?

If it's full of bugs, it simply doesn't matter.

The "e2e" concept that most are familiar with is basically fake: the provider is responsible for the client that does the encryption and decryption. Of course they can break it if forced. Software exploits are a separate matter and also easier to deal with when the end user isn't truly in control of the encryption (or easier if they don't know what they are doing.)

If the client is properly developed and secured, they cannot break it without shipping an update to that client to change its behavior - which then affects everyone.

I'm quite sure they can use the app store to push a targeted update just to some.

Yes, an operating system that uses a compromised software supply chain is at risk of compromise, but that really has nothing to do with e2ee.

E2EE itself as a concept is ridiculous. The word was stolen from networking, end to end, and repurposed for an entirely different and non-sensical context to describe sth completely else. It has to do with "E2EE" because the biggest provided of it, Signal, pushes you to use 'compromised software supply chains' that are iOS and Play Store, evensofar as to spreading FUD about alternative distribution mechanisms, like APKs. That's why you have to go over yourself to find the APK of the App on Signal's website.

I am very suspicious of Signal, for not not being on f-droid, but being on play store.

I'm sure the protocol is fine and all, but playstore can easily be used to compromise everything anyway.

Also I've read many times Bruce Schneier claim that Signal is the most secure communication system that exists, and Whatsapp is the 2nd best, because it (allegedly, but we don't know) uses the same protocol.

Do you think F-Droid is more resilient to malicious influence than Google's Play Store?

I haven't looked deeply into how F-Droid is currently operating, so maybe I'm off here, but isn't it just all on a server run by some random guy in his free time? I love what F-Droid is doing, and I think it has a bright future, but in its current state I would never trust it on any of my devices that I use for anything important.

Also, yeah, it really is super easy to crack open the WhatApp APK and confirm that it is, in fact, using libsignal. That would be kind of a weird thing to lie about, since anyone could quickly call them out on it.

Using libsignal doesn't mean that there is no API to enable a side channel :)

I think that google and apple would just comply and do whatever they are told, while the f-droid guy needs to be hacked and might notice he got hacked, so in that sense it's safer.

Them not being on F-Droid is justifiable because F-Droid app IS less secure than alternatives. It does not use modern Android session installer, which is problematic in many different ways. Granted, there are third party F-Droid apps like Droidify that fix these issues.

How is it less secure than the play store?

No need, push an update to all that only affects certain users. But if anyone ever de-obfuscates that, your reputation is gone.

If you push only to some it's less likely to ever be detected.

It's more fake because you download the app, look up your friend's number "1-555-333-2222", and your client trusts their server to actually return your friend instead of a MITM. Some asterisks there, but basically it's far from trustless.

Isn't this what the "safety number" in Signal is for? Obviously you are still trusting many other things there (the client software, OS, hardware, whatever out of band method you use to compare the numbers, etc.), but I thought the safety number pretty much addresses the MITM concern specifically, if you bother to check it.

Right, the issue is that nobody checks it and they don't really tell users upfront why they need to. It also notifies you if the number changes later, but seems like that can happen for benign reasons too, so it might go ignored. WhatsApp and Telegram are similar.

Someone could orient an E2EE app around these trusted identities, but it'd probably not be very popular.

> Is there an exception for emergency purposes?

The problem is when the "emergency" is "the citizen may be engaged in political activities that are against the interests of the ruling party."

Yes, in case of an emergency you can ask God to give you the prime factorization of 4096bit numbers.

I think that depends on what you mean: a general state of emergency or a specific situation where the police deem there to be an emergency (e.g. classic hidden bomb scenario)

Regarding (2), the Court found that a statutory obligation to decrypt E2E-encrypted data upon (judicial) request to be disproportionate, but it could still be imagined that – if more narrowly construed – a law could be considered to be proportionate. But the Court does seem quite unwilling to entertain the idea of backdoors for E2E encryption.

Regarding (1), the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) allows so-called derogations from certain rights in "time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation" (Art 15 ECHR), insofar as they are necessary and the state of emergency has been properly declared. The right to privacy is such a right, so a State that faces an insurgency may declare a state of emergency and, as part of its emergency measures, could probably demand the decryption of E2E communications if it's necessary to fight the insurgency (e.g. it's a guerilla group using an E2E messenger) - but hard to judge in the abstract.

When there is an emergency to break into a house, the police needs to get a mandate from a judge.

Well, there is actually an exception to that too - the Police can break into any home, without a warrant, in the US, if they can prove they had reasonable cause to believe that there was imminent and immediate threat of bodily harm or death.

If you are a police officer and see a guy clearly pointing a gun at someone else through the window, yes, you can break in if the circumstances warrant that.

Or if you receive an anonymous call from a swatter..

The flip side of that is that if the police enter on that basis, any evidence they come across in the course of that action is going to be tainted and potentially thrown out of court, especially if that evidence wasn't in plain sight.

No, they don't. Many countries have the concept of "imminent danger", which allows police to skip the warrants. It's called "Gefahr im Verzug" in Germany, for instance.

Depends on where you are. In the US there's the Exigent Circumstances exception to the warrant requirement. Not sure if the same theory has been included in EU countries but I would be surprised if it hadn't, a quick search didn't turn up much english language about it.

https://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/jury-instructions/node/155

That's not true at least in Spain. There's "In flagrante delicto" which means if the police suspects something going on they can kick your door down.

It was used many times during the pandemic: when they suspected you were having too many people over at home, they acted. Unconstitutionally, mind you.

The EU is not the utopia many think it is.

You’d need to define “unconstitutionally” as it seems if they have the right then it is constitutional

The constitutional court of Spain ruled the state of alarm (a kind of state of emergency) that was used to prohibit gatherings during the pandemic was unconstitutional. But by then the damage was made of course.

The constitutional court of Spain is an ultra-rightwing joke. Imprisoning Catalan nationalist politicians for calling for independence brought that court into disrepute.

I'm not keen on written constitutions, or constitutional courts <cough US Supremes>.

Errr, that's not exactly what they did, as well as you know :-)

In any case I hope we can agree that it's good that they said that restricting our constitutional right to free movement was illegal, even if it had no consequences for those who violated our basic rights so blatantly.

If I'm wrong about the constitutional court sentencing Catalan nationalist politicians to prison, that's not something I know; feel free to correct me.

I don't know what that has to do with free movement, nor how that's related to the imprisoned politicians.

FWIW, I don't accept the notion of "human rights" - there are in reality only those privileges that are actually granted. I would like it if there were some kind of universally-accepted set of rights; but only if they are congruent with my own views about what "rights" should look like.

They did more than just "calling for independence". Use your search engine of choice to find out what they did.

And this was not a case of a violation of "human rights", in which I also do not believe. During the pandemic, there was a flagrant violation of our constitutional rights, among them, the right to free movement (which very roughly means, as a Spanish citizen, I can go anywhere in Spain, whenever I want) and free assembly. The constitutional court makes sure that the constitution has teeth, or so they should.

People think the EU is a utopia? I just think it is the best of a bad bunch

there’s only and opposing secret court mandating the opposite: publicly available encryption must be weakened on release

Exceptional circumstances can warrant exceptional measures, but also require exceptional justification, for example by means of a juridical decision for the individual case (i.e., a judge issuing a warrant allowing the police to install and use a backdoor on a concrete individual).

Let’s just remind that “exceptional justifications” in Canada were “Truckers are protesting with honks in the middle of cities”, so not exactly a matter of national security and in the USA, NSA took it to mean “Any US or non-US citizen on US or non-US soil” (for national security letters).

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