Comment by tekacs
2 days ago
Just to talk about a different direction here for a second:
Something that I find to be a frustrating side effect of malware issues like this is that it seems to result in well-intentioned security teams locking down the data in apps.
The justification is quite plausible -- in this case WhatsApp messages were being stolen! But the thing is... that if this isn't what they steal they'll steal something else.
Meanwhile locking down those apps so the only apps with a certain signature can read from your WhatsApp means that if you want to back up your messages or read them for any legitimate purpose you're now SOL, or reliant on a usually slow, non-automatable UI-only flow.
I'm glad that modern computers are more secure than they have been, but I think that defense in depth by locking down everything and creating more silos is a problem of its own.
I agree with this, just to note for context though: This (or rather the package that was forked) is not a wrapper of any official WhatsApp API or anything like that, it poses as a WhatsApp client (WhatsApp Web), which the author reverse engineered the protocol of.
So users go through the same steps as if they were connecting another client to their WhatsApp account, and the client gets full access to all data of course.
From what I understand WhatsApp is already fairly locked down, so people had to resort to this sort of thing – if WA had actually offered this data via a proper API with granular permissions, there might have been a lower chance of this happening.
See: https://baileys.wiki/docs/intro/
Right, it would need to use an integrity API to prohibit 3rd party clients.
The OS should be mediating such access where it explicitly asks your permission for an app to access data belonging to another publisher.
I could certainly see the value in this in principle but sadly the labyrinthine mess that is the Apple permission system (in which they learned none of the lessons of early UAC) illustrates the kind of result that seems to arise from this.
A great microcosm illustration of this is automation permission on macOS right now: there's a separate allow dialog for every single app. If you try to use a general purpose automation app it needs to request permission for every single app on your computer individually the first time you use it. Having experienced that in practice it... absolutely sucks.
At this point it makes me feel like we need something like an async audit API. Maybe the OS just tracks and logs all of your apps' activity and then:
1) You can view it of course.
2) The OS monitors for deviations from expected patterns for that app globally (kinda like Microsoft's SmartScreen?)
3) Your own apps can get permission to read this audit log if you want to analyze it your own way and/or be more secure. If you're more paranoid maybe you could use a variant that kills an app in a hurry if it's misbehaving.
Sadly you can't even implement this as a third party thing on macOS at this point because the security model prohibits you from monitoring other apps. You can't even do it with the user's permission because tracing apps requires you to turn SIP off.
> Maybe the OS just tracks and logs all of your apps' activity
The problem here, is that like so many social-media apps, the first thing the app will do is scrape as much as it possibly can from the device, lest it lose access later, at which point auditing it and restricting its permissions is already too late.
Give an inch, and they’ll take a mile. Better to make them justify every millimetre instead.
This just sounds like another security nightmare.
We're not in 1980 anymore. Most people need zero, and even power users need at most one or two apps that need that full access to the disk.
In macOS, for example, the sandbox and the file dialog already allow opening any file, bundle or folder on the disk. I haven't really come across any app that does better browsing than this dialog, but if there's any, it should be a special case. Funny enough, WhatsApp on iOS is an app that reimplements the photo browser, as a dark pattern to force users to either give full permission to photos or suffer.
The only time where the OS file dialog becomes limited is when a file is actually "multiple files". Which is 1) solvable by bundles or folders and 2) a symptom of developers not giving a shit about usability.
Time vibe code our own freakin OS with sane defaults. Use the linux kernel as a base for hardware support
MacOS does this. It has a popup to grant access to folders like documents.
This sounds great on paper, but what happens when the OS isn't working for the user like Windows?
Switch OS.
I mean this was an app for accessing WhatsApp data, you would approve it and go on... the problem is with it sending data off to a 3rd party.
2 replies →
Windows is dead
I'm pretty sure WhatsApp does this for anti-competitive reasons not security reasons.
Meanwhile locking down those apps so the only apps with a certain signature can read from your WhatsApp means that if you want to back up your messages or read them for any legitimate purpose you're now SOL, or reliant on a usually slow, non-automatable UI-only flow.
...and this gives them more control, so they can profit from it. Corporate greed knows no bounds.
I'm glad that modern computers are more secure than they have been
I'm not. Back when malware was more prevalent among the lower class, there was also far more freedom and interoperability.
> Back when malware was more prevalent among the lower class, there was also far more freedom and interoperability.
Yeah, “the lower class” had the freedom of having their IM accounts hacked and blast spam/scam messages to all contacts all the time. How nostalgic.
The virus-infested computers caused by scam versions of Neopets, are not dissimilar to Windows today.
Live internet popups you didn't ask for, live tracking of everything you do, new buttons suddenly appearing in every toolbar. All of it slowing down your machine.
xkcd covers this really well: https://xkcd.com/2044/
It seems to me the only adequate solution regarding any of these types of security and privacy vs data sharing and access matters, is going to be an OS and system level agent that can identify and question behaviors and data flows (AI firewall and packet inspection?), and configure systems in line with the user’s accepted level of risk and privacy.
It is already a major security and privacy risk for users to rely on the beneficence and competence of developers (let alone corporations and their constant shady practices/rug-pulls), as all the recent malware and large scale supply chain compromises have shown. I find the only acceptable solution would be to use AI to help users (and devs, for that matter) navigate and manage the exponential complexity of privacy and security.
For a practical example, imagine your iOS AI Agent notifying you that as you had requested, it is informing you that it adjusted the Facebook data sharing settings because the SOBs changed them to be more permissive again after the last update. It may even then suggest that since this is the 5685th shady incident by Facebook, that it may be time to adjust the position towards what to share on Facebook.
That could also extend to the subject story; where one’s agent blocks and warns of the behavior of a library an app uses, which is exfiltrating WhatsApp messages/data and sending it off device.
Ideally such malicious code will soon also be identified way sooner as AI agents can become code reviewers, QA, and even maintainers of open source packages/libraries, which would intercept such behaviors well before being made available; but ultimately, I believe it should all become a function of the user’s agent looking out for their best interests on the individual level. We simply cannot sustain “trust me, bro” security and privacy anymore…especially since as has been demonstrated quite clearly, you cannot trust anyone anymore in the west, whether due to deliberate or accidental actions, because the social compact has totally broken down… you’re on your own… just you and your army of AI agents in the matrix.
I imagine the average HN commenter seeing every new story being posted and thinking "how could I criticise big tech using this"
That's the funny thing about those here in the spirit of Hacker News. We want to build – to hack.
It's all well and good for us all to use Linux to side-step this, but sometimes (shock, horror), we even want to _share_ those hacks with other people!
As such, it's kinda nice if the Big Tech software on those devices didn't lock all of our friends in tiny padded cells 'for their own safety'.
I don't really know what I'm doing, but. Why couldn't messages be stored encrypted on a blockchain with a system where both user's in a one-one conversation agree to a key, or have their own keys, that grants permission for 'their' messages. And then you'd never be locked into a private software / private database / private protocol. You could read your messages at any point with your key.
I hope we all have the same change in sentiment about AI in 3 years from now!