Selfhosted @lemmy.world CrimeDad @lemmy.crimedad.work 11 mo. ago

Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users

www.macrumors.com Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users

Unidentified governments are surveilling smartphone users by tracking push notifications that move through Google's and Apple's servers, a US...

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/39255

Is self-hosted enough to avoid push notifications going through Apple and Google servers?

29 comments

surprised face
That depends a lot on what you're hosting resp. if the mobile apps are using Google's/Apple's messaging/notification services.
- Sort of. If you’re receiving a notification from a remote server on iOS or standard android, they go through Apple or googles servers. That said, some apps rather than sending your device the actual notification (where this vulnerability comes from) will instead send a type of invisible notification that basically tells the app to check for a new message or whatever and then will display a local notification so the actual message stays on device and inside of the hosting services servers (like a self host.)
  
  That said, some apps rather than sending your device the actual notification
  
  Pretty sure that is actually the recommendation from apple/google, as it reduces bandwidth for their notification servers.
  I think the message payload is severely limited.
  Like, pre-ios8 the limit was 256 bytes. Now it's 2kb.
  
  https://stackoverflow.com/a/6316022
That's why everyone should use GrapheneOS. Sandboxed GooglePlay services can be used, if needed. I personally use 3 proprietary apps, one of them is WhatsApp Business (self-employed and for stupid dipshits that won't use anything else...), which is more privacy-friendly than the personal client itself. Join the resistance! Use GrapheneOS :)

Good read about push notifications on GOS: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/9407-this-is-why-i-use-grapheneos
- Sandboxed GooglePlay services can be used, if needed.
  
  I don't see how that would prevent this at all.
  
  What is being discussed here is governments compromising the push notification service on Apple's servers (and presumably Google's as well)
  
  Sandboxing Google services on your phone does nothing to change the fact that virtually all apps that receive messages/notifications are going to be using the push notification APIs that are compromised.
  
  Whether or not private data is sent in those pushes and whether or not they are encrypted is up to the app developers.
  
  It's common for push messages to simply be used as a triggering mechanism to tell the device to download the message securely so much of what is compromised in those cases will simply be done metadata or even just "a new message is available"
  
  But even so, that information could be used to link your device to data they acquired using other methods based on the timing of the push and subsequent download or "pull"
  
  The problem is that if you go ahead and disable push notifications/only use apps that allow you to, you are going to have abysmal battery life and an increase in data use because your phone will have to constantly ping cloud servers asking if new messages/notifications are available.
  
  With micro g you can toggle google cloud messaging.
  
  Yeah you're right. Sandboxed gplay services can still be used to surveil clients, good thing you can use another profile with gplay services and install apps (which needs those) on there, meaning no potential leaks for apps that use their own push notification service and closed APIs (Google or Firebase). Good thread about it: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/d/9407-this-is-why-i-use-grapheneos
  
  Would applications that don't use GMS be compromised too? Example: everything from F-droid
- How does it handle push notifications? If they come from googles push service then they'd be exploitable as well.
  
  Indeed - it seems that this tracking is done completely outside of the phone, asking the network where, physically, the push notification was delivered (Tower, time, and date) to locate the phone and ostensibly the owner of the phone.
  
  https://grapheneos.org/faq#notifications
- What we need is more open hardware. Current phones are privacy issues because they are black boxes. Even if a libre device has bad security it always can be improved.
  
  I use Lineage os on my phone with only free apps.
  
  More open source hardware would be epic, but imo this trend will take years to grow if it even will succeed. Most people just don't care about their privacy at all and with hw and sw being open, there's less money to be earned because of easier plagiarism.
  
  Put pressure to release the FP5 in the US. I don't know why they decided not to
- How do you sandbox Google apps? Is it possible to do that with Google docs? I've been replacing everything else, but Google docs is difficult to replace.
  
  Every app is sandboxed by default and has no permissions, which you can give them. Like StorageScope for accessing only certain files.
I’m curious how things like gotify stand up to this. Since it’s a notification server does it still rely on Google and it’s notification servers?
- Notify (hope I remmeber the name right) has an option for both push notifications (with the usage of Google services) and polling based notifications (fully self-hosted)
New Lemmy Post: Apple Confirms Governments Using Push Notifications to Surveil Users (https://lemmy.world/post/9256878)
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