Hacker News Reader

Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

That was only added 19 days ago - after months of people (politely) asking for it to be acknowledged as a serious concern.

https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commit/0a29ffcf4...

View on HN

Shouldn't Signal then also warn or refuse to work on Android versions with known vulnerabilities? Or if there are apps installed on the device with the accessibility permission?

Where would you say the line should be drawn?

There's some missing nuance here. Naomi Wu documented this much better than my summary, but the short version is that you need an IME keyboard for Chinese text entry, and the only one that's any good (and so, has a huge install base) is an application created and owned by a corporation with strong ties to the Chinese government.

When there's a security rake-in-a-darkened-shed that a large fraction of your users will step on, with a demonstrable risk to their life and liberty, I think reasonable people can agree that we're standing on the "hey, maybe we should at least pop a dialog about this" side of the line.

It took Moxie well over a year to come to the same conclusion, and then in a really lazy way as documented by the commit upthread. I'm starting to see him as a particularly unreasonable person.

First, I speak Chinese, I understand what the IME thing is about. I agree that the "Incognito Keyboard" flag is a miscommunication, it should say "Politely tell my IME don't use my input to make smart suggestions", but IMO it is more of an OS issue instead of application issue. Android decided this should be called "IME Incognito Mode", but in reality it is not enforced and merely a hint to the IME. Maybe in addition to calling out Signal, we should also try to convince Google to change the name?

For "pop a dialog about this", I don't know, that's an interesting idea, but it is hard to draw the borderline if you pursue this route.

For example, do you know that Tencent QQ bundles a full-blown endpoint security solution trying to "protect their users" and warn them their computing environment is compromised? To the point it installs a kernel driver to do the detection. Most of my tech-savvy Chinese friends believe this is bad, not only because the possible privacy dilemma but simply because it is not an messaging app's duty to ensure the user have a safe computing environment. Surely Signal can pop up a dialog about the IME concern, but what's next? When somebody bring up an interesting cross app side-channel leak on Android, should Signal scan the installed package list, try to flag any "suspicious app"?

"But what's next" is a slippery slope argument that isn't interesting. This particular issue is unique, and it makes sense to warn about it, and there's no really good reason not to when doing so is so trivially accomplished.

Hemming and hawing whether a line warning about a vulnerability that compromises a secure messaging app for over a year for any reason, but especially because of a shitty, arguably sexist tone argument not behavior I want to see from people who make security tools.

I feel like this is somewhat disingenuous.

IME keylogging is a known, serious, and frequently exploited issue that affects a substantial portion of Signal users. Signal's "Incognito Keyboard" setting didn't mention that the flag can be ignored, which was misleading and dangerous.

But yes, warning about accessibility settings if there's evidence of that being an attack vector seems like a good idea. I don't know about unsupported Android versions.

https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/status/134995902394088652...

> frequently exploited

Do you happen to have a source for this? There’s lots of speculation out there, but I’ve never seen anyone claiming to have proof of this being frequently exploited.

Yes, I linked it above.

You did not. Realsexycyborg has no idea if this is being exploited or not, she’s only speculating.

> if there's evidence of that being an attack vector seems like a good idea

Actually *most* Android malware use accessibility APIs to perform malicious action, random example from a quick Google search: https://medium.com/axdb/%EF%B8%8F-dissecting-defensor-a-stea... . That's simply because this is the most convenient way to perform malicious actions on Android without an exploit. Sure you have to convince the victim for permission, but with a nice lure people usually just fall for it.

It is much much more prevalent than malicious IMEs. Now help your "freedom in danger" friends by raising this up as a security vulnerability to Signal developers plz! /s

In fact it might not be such a bad idea to warn about those things, and perhaps a short list of other possibly privacy-compromising settings

What would you consider to be an acceptable length of time for a feedback cycle for an understaffed organization who gives away their services for free? I think "months" can be entirely reasonable.

At this point you're not complaining about the end result -- they did actually implement something as a result of the feedback -- you're just complaining about the time it took them to do so. Which is IMO pretty silly, as the Signal folks make their own decisions about prioritization, and they're not at all beholden to the people who don't pay them for their service for any kind of schedule guarantees.

I think a swift acknowledgement is useful.

Moxie could have said "gosh, that sounds like a serious issue. Let us investigate it." Instead, he ignored the women reporting it, sent snarky DMs about the people involved, and stonewalled any attempt to discuss it.

The fix was made - as far as I can tell - without any engagement with the community affected by the problem.

Signal received $50m in funding a few years ago. If they're understaffed, something is awry.

It took well over a year for them to address it, and only after blocking many of the people who raised the issue and denying it was an issue. The nature of the problem meant that people were being detained because Signal was misrepresenting the degree of protection it could reasonably provide.

That... Sounds exactly like taking external feedback?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com