upvote
In the US at least, companies can and do receive secret demands from the government to add whatever kind of backdoor they want, and you're not allowed to disclose it in any way, they even order you to preserve any warrant canaries you have implemented.

This is for example why Lavabit chose to go out of business instead of giving up their keys.

reply
The company can provide secure enclave and allow the architecture to be audited by third parties.

Which apple does.

It's largely academic though, as almost nobody opts-in to escalated e2e posture in apple services unless they're a high risk person (journalist, dissident, etc).

The headaches that come from e2e everything are too great for most people.

reply
deleted
reply
Yes that's exactly his point. E2E is often sold as preventing the owners of the server from being able to read the messages at all, even if they are evil and misleading you.

That's obviously only the case if they aren't also the sole providers of the "ends".

reply
There are actual methods to do this though just not sure anyone does it yet.

1. 3rd party audit of a current repo hash 2. Public hosting of hash 3. Modern attested compute can check the current startup and running code hash and return to the user for their own checks. 4. User encrypts the last known hash they used or trust a 3rd party to perform the check like azure's methods.

Another way is to open source it and repeat 2/3/4

The way around that requires either a backdoor in attested hardware which would be wild if discovered because it's the same tech protecting companies and governments most sensitive info so they're all incentivised to audit that.

reply
I seem to recall that Apple provided an audit
reply
How would that work for closed source apps like iMessage and WhatsApp?
reply
"3rd party audit"
reply