Comment by pengaru

4 years ago

Champions of privacy, phoning home a hash of every executable your computer runs!

Enablers, that is what they are. If the EU manages to push that anti-encryption thing through, Apple will be the one forced to remove the App from your PC. 1984 is here already.

> Champions of privacy, phoning home a hash of every executable your computer runs!

What’s the matter with privacy? That’s a basic signature check, and you can do so while preserving privacy by using salted hashes or a similar solution.

  • A centralized repository of all your executable hashes is a high precision fingerprint.

    • There are two major somewhat misleading bits of buzz around macOS “phoning home” all of our executables.

      1: among Windows, macOS and Linux only Linux distros don’t do such checks, and most of end-user Linux installations are arguably secure in spite of this—mostly because they are very rare and thus not a priority target for malware.

      2: this only concerns files you launch. If you wrap your binary invocation in a shell script, that shell script’s hash will be sent, not your binary’s.

      5 replies →

    • Yes it is, but merely sending hashes doesn’t mean such a centralized repository exists. We need more information on the actual implementation.

  • They can perfectly do that without recurring to sending the hashes, using asymmetric cryptography.

    But... this way the also gather some data.

  • I don’t understand how salted hashes would obfuscate the query. Private information retrieval is much more complicated than private password storage, and how do we know what the protocol is?