My long-time collaborator Richard Barnes[1] used to say that "in security, trust is a four letter word", and yet the dominant experience of

Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway

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2024-12-28 21:30:02

My long-time collaborator Richard Barnes[1] used to say that "in security, trust is a four letter word", and yet the dominant experience of using any software-based system—which is, you know, pretty much anything electronic—is trusting the manufacturer. Not only is there no meaningful way to determine what software is running on a given device without trusting the device, even when you download the software yourself, verifying that it's not malicious is extraordinarily difficult in practice and mostly you just end up trusting the vendor anyway. Obviously, most vendors are honest, but what if they're not?

A good motivating case here is secure messaging apps like iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal. People use these apps because they want to be able to communicate securely and they are willing to trust them with really sensitive information. In fact, a large part of the value proposition of a secure messenger is that not even the vendor can see your communications. For instance, here's what Apple has to say about iMessage and FaceTime.

End-to-end encryption protects your iMessage and FaceTime conversations across all your devices. With watchOS, iOS, and iPadOS, your messages are encrypted on your device so they can’t be accessed without your passcode. iMessage and FaceTime are designed so that there’s no way for Apple to read your messages when they’re in transit between devices. You can choose to automatically delete your messages from your device after 30 days or a year or keep them on your device indefinitely. Messages sent via satellite also use end-to-end encryption to protect your privacy.