I remember reading an article where the government and Google were able to read notifications and record them from every android device. I wonder if Graphene might have patched this problem, and if not, do they have any plans to do so?
Thanks!
I remember reading an article where the government and Google were able to read notifications and record them from every android device. I wonder if Graphene might have patched this problem, and if not, do they have any plans to do so?
Thanks!
MicroG is just an open source method to access Google’s servers. If then problem is server-side (which I think it is), then microg won’t help you here.
Essentially, the apps which don’t use Google FCM service are not affected (from what I understand?). I assume that there isn’t a problem on the client-side and this exploit works purely because Google stores these notifications.
Anything using FCM will be effected. UnifiedPush which I mentioned I don’t believe has an option to encrypt notification content either. Using it you’d already at least have the option of using a provider with a better privacy policy or self hosting it.
This is not an option you would actually want from any service.
You don’t want to be giving the plain text message to anyone to encrypt. Instead the notification contents should be given to the service provider (FCM or anyone else) already encrypted and only able to be decrypted by the app.
I believe apps working without FCM should be fine, or at least require more effort for third parties like law enforcement to intercept. There’s nothing preventing the NSA from listening in on the notifications of alternatives either, of course. Ideally, all notification services have their notification encrypted end-to-end. If app developers do that, FCM should be fine.
Would you happen to know what WhatsApp and Signal use? I believe FOSS apps from F-droid do not use Google’s notification service
Both default to FCM as far as I know. WhatsApp has a fallback notification system, but I don’t think Signal does.
Edir: correction: Signal does seem to work without FCM, but if you set it up and then nuke FCM, Signal will show a near permanent notification indicating that Signal needs Google Play services because of a bug.
FOSS apps sometimes use FCM, though that should be labeled in the app details as an anti feature, I believe. It’s very hard (almost impossible) to write power efficient notifications without centralising the notification flow.
There are semi-standards, like Unified Push, that can help, and UP can even use FCM as a backend if you so wish, but I don’t think many apps use it at the moment.
Thanks, I’ll go read some more. I’m trying to move away from WhatsApp and wanted to run Signal in my main profile on Graphene. I hope I can use it without FCM there.
Signal does have a fallback if FCM is unavailable. It supposedly uses slightly more battery, but I can’t say I noticed it. I’ve swapped to using Molly which is a fork of Signal which implements UnifiedPush (among some other features).