Nothing Chats has already been pulled from Google Play after reports that Sunbird sends messages in plain text
Nothing Chats has already been pulled from Google Play after reports that Sunbird sends messages in plain text
Nothing pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Google Play store “until further notice” after reports that Sunbird sends messages in plain text.
Well that took even less time than we all expected.
8This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nothing has pulled the Nothing Chats beta from the Google Play store, saying it is “delaying the launch until further notice” while it fixes “several bugs.” The app promised to let Nothing Phone 2 users text with iMessage, but it required allowing Sunbird, who provides the platform, log into users’ iCloud accounts on its own Mac Mini servers, which... isn’t great?
The removal came after users widely shared a blog from Texts.com showing that messages sent with Sunbird’s system aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted — and that it’s not hard to compromise it.
The app launched in beta yesterday after being announced earlier this week.
9to5Google pointed to a thread from site author Dylan Roussel, who found that part of Sunbird’s solution involves decrypting and transmitting messages using HTTP to a Firebase cloud-syncing server and storing them there in unencrypted plain text.
Roussel posted that the company itself has access to messages because it logs them as errors using Sentry, a debugging service.
Sunbird claimed yesterday that HTTP is “only used as part of the one-off initial request from the app notifying back-end of the upcoming iMessage connection.”
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7The removal came after users widely shared a blog from Texts.com showing that messages sent with Sunbird’s system aren’t actually end-to-end encrypted — and that it’s not hard to compromise it.
End to end encryption means my device encrypts it and yours decrypts it. Their bridge will never be able to support this, it has to decrypt it in the middle to transfer to and from the other service. At the very best, when their implementation isn’t slipshod, you have to trust them when they say they ignore all the (hopefully temporary) plain text data that is passing through their bridge.
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