Apple’s Nonsensical Attack On Beeper For Making Apple’s Own Users Safer

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the weakening-security-to-lock-up-users dept

Apple has spent the past few years pushing the marketing message that it, alone among the big tech companies, is dedicated to your privacy. This has always been something of an exaggeration, but certainly less of Apple’s business is based around making use of your data, and the company has built in some useful encryption elements to its services (both for data at rest, and data in transit). But, its actions over the past few days call all of that into question, and suggest that Apple’s commitment to privacy is much more a commitment to walled gardens and Apple’s bottom line, rather than the privacy of Apple’s users.

First, some background:

Back in September, we noted that the EU had designated which services were going to be “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which would put on them various obligations, including regarding some level of interoperability. Apple had been fighting the EU over whether or not iMessage would qualify, and just a few days ago there were reports that the EU would not designate iMessage as a gatekeeper. But that’s not final yet. This also came a few weeks after Apple revealed that, after years of pushing back on the idea, it might finally support RCS for messaging (though an older version that doesn’t support end-to-end encryption).

Separately, for years, there has been some debate over Apple’s setup in which messaging from Android phones shows up in “green bubbles” vs. iMessage’s “blue bubbles.” The whole green vs. blue argument is kind of silly, but some people reasonably pointed out that by not allowing Android users to actually use iMessage itself, it was making communications less secure. That’s because messages within the iMessage ecosystem can be end-to-end encrypted. But messages between iMessage and an Android phone are not. If Apple actually opened up iMessage to other devices, messaging for iPhone users and the people they spoke to would be much more protected.

But, instead of doing that, Apple has generally made snarky “just buy an iPhone” comments when asked about its unwillingness to interoperate securely.

That’s why Apple’s actions over the last week have been so stupidly frustrating.

For the past few years, some entrepreneurs (including some of the folks who built the first great smartwatch, the Pebble), have been building Beeper, a universal messaging app that is amazing. I’ve been using it since May and have sworn by it and gotten many others to use it as well. It creates a very nice, very usable single interface for a long list of messaging apps, reminiscent of earlier such services like Trillian or Pidgin… but better. It’s built on top of Matrix, the open-source decentralized messaging platform.

Over the last few months I’ve been talking up Beeper to lots of folks as the kind of app the world needs more of. It fits with my larger vision of a world in which protocols dominate over siloed platforms. It’s also an example of the kind of adversarial interoperability that used to be standard, and which Cory Doctorow rightfully argues is a necessary component of stopping the enshittification curve of walled garden services.

Of course, as we’ve noted, the big walled gardens are generally not huge fans of things that break down their walls, and have fought back over the years, including with terrible CFAA lawsuits against similar aggregators (the key one being Facebook’s lawsuit against Power.com). And ever since I started using Beeper, I wondered if anyone (and especially Apple) might take the same approach and sue.

There have been some reasonable concerns, about how Beeper handled end-to-end encrypted messaging services like Signal, WhatsApp, and iMessage. It originally did this by basically setting up a bunch of servers that it controls, which has access to your messages. In some ways, Beeper is an “approved” man-in-the-middle attack on your messages, with some safeguards, but built in such a way that those messages are no longer truly end-to-end encrypted. Beeper has taken steps to do this as securely as possible, and many users will think those tradeoffs are acceptable for the benefit. But, still, those messages have not been truly end-to-end encrypted. (For what it’s worth, Beeper open sourced this part of its code so if you were truly concerned, you could also host the bridge yourself and basically man in the middle yourself to make Beeper work, but I’m guessing very few people did that).

That said, from early on Beeper has made it clear that it would like to move away from this setup to true end-to-end encryption, but that requires interoperable end-to-end encrypted APIs, which (arguably) the DMA may mandate.

Or… maybe it just takes a smart hacking teen.

Over the summer, a 16-year-old named James Gill reached out to Beeper’s Eric Migicovsky and said he’d reimplemented iMessage in a project he’d released called Pypush. Basically, he reverse engineered iMessage and created a system by which you could message securely in a truly end-to-end encrypted manner with iMessage users.

If you want to understand the gory details, and why this setup is actually secure (and not just secure-like), Snazzy Labs has a great video:

Over the last few months, Beeper had upgraded the bridge setup it used for iMessage within its offering to make use of Pypush. Beeper also released a separate new app for Android, called Beeper Mini, which is just for making iMessage available for Android users in an end-to-end encrypted manner. It also allows users (unlike the original Beeper, now known as Beeper Cloud) to communicate with iMessage users just via their phone number, and not via an AppleID (Beeper Cloud requires the Apple ID). Beeper Mini costs $2/month (after a short free trial), and apparently there was demand for it.

I spoke to Migicovsky on Sunday and he told me they had over 100k downloads in the first two days it was available, and that it’s the most successful launch of a paid Android app ever. It was a clear cut example of why interoperability without permission (adversarial interoperability) is so important, and folks like Cory Doctorow rightfully cheered this on.

But all that attention also seems to have finally woken up Apple. On Friday, users of both Beeper Cloud and Beeper Mini found that they could no longer message people via iMessage. If you watch that YouTube video above by Snazzy Labs, he explains why it’s not that easy for Apple to block the way Beeper Mini works, but, Apple still has more resources at its disposal than just about anyone else and devoted some of them to doing exactly what Snazzy Labs (and Beeper) thought it was unlikely to do: blocking Beeper Mini from working.

So… with that all as background, the key thing to understand here is that Beeper Mini was making everyone’s messaging more secure. It certainly better protected Android users in making sure their messages to iPhone users were encrypted. And it similarly better protected Apple users, in making sure their messages to Android users were also encrypted. Which means that Apple’s response to this whole mess underscores the lie that Apple cares about users’ privacy.

Apple’s PR strategy is often to just stay silent, but it actually did respond to David Pierce at the Verge and put out a PR statement that is simply utter nonsense, claiming it did this to “protect” Apple users.

At Apple, we build our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and keep personal information safe. We took steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage. These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users. 

Almost everything here is wrong. Literally, Beeper Mini’s interoperable setup better protected the privacy of Apple’s customers than Apple itself did. Beeper Mini’s setup absolutely did not “pose significant risks to user security and privacy.” It effectively piggybacked onto Apple’s end-to-end encryption system to make sure that it was extended to messages between iOS users and Android users, better protecting both of them.

When I spoke to Eric on Sunday he pledged that if Apple truly believed that Beeper Mini somehow put Apple users at risk, he was happy to agree to have the software fully audited by an independent third party security auditor that the two organizations agreed upon to see if it created any security vulnerabilities.

For many years people like myself and Cory Doctorow have been talking up the importance of interoperability, open protocols, and an end to locked-down silos. Big companies, including Apple, have often made claims about “security” and “privacy” to argue against such openness. But this seems like a pretty clear case in which that’s obviously bullshit. The security claims here are weak, given that from the way Beeper Mini is constructed, it seems significantly more secure than Apple’s own implementation, which puts less security on iOS-Android interactions.

And for Apple to do this just as policymakers are looking for more and more ways to ensure openness and interoperability seems like a very stupid self-own. We’ll see if the EU decides to exempt iMessage from the DMA’s “gateekeeper” classification and its interop requirements, but policymakers elsewhere are certainly noticing.

While I often think that Elizabeth Warren’s tech policy plans are bonkers, she’s correctly calling out this effort by Apple.

She’s correct. Chatting between different platforms should be easy and secure, and Apple choosing to weaken the protections of its users while claiming it’s doing the opposite is absolute nonsense, and should be called out as such.

Filed Under: adversarial interoperability, blue bubbles, end to end encryption, green bubbles, imessage, interoperability, messaging, open source, protocols, pypush, silos
Companies: apple, beeper