Hacker News Reader

Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

Since Apple controls the entire infrastructure, there's nothing preventing company employees from swapping out the proper keys with ones controlled by Apple or other parties.

Well internal controls could prevent that but since we don't know we'll assume they don't exist, print the headline:

Tim Cook is reading your iMessages right now!

View on HN

Well, being prevented by internal controls is outside the scope of the question. Apple had claimed that they were incapable of intercepting the messages, not that they had policies against it. And Apple is known to be subject to secret US government demands that come with a gag order.

They said that they couldn't read iMessages as it is. One would think it was pretty obvious that they could change the system to be able to read them.

What we know is that it seems possible, when looking at the system externally, for them to perform MITM attacks. What we don't know is if their system internally makes it possible for anyone inside apple to intercept and read those messages, with or without an order from the NSA. They could very well have told us the truth!

No, what we know is that it seems impossible for them to perform MITM attacks at the moment, but they appear to have the ability to rewrite the app later if they wanted to perform MITM attacks. At least that's how I understood it.

"being prevented by internal controls is outside the scope of the question"

/shrug, when Gabriel W. says no one at Duck Duck Go can read your search history he's making a claim based entirely on internal controls that DDG has established that make this impossible. Similarly, Apple didn't claim it would be impossible for them to ever <rewrite everything> and one day be able to read your iMessages.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com