Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones

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ccdrnsf about 20 hours ago 175 commentsRead Article on techcrunch.com

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Discussion (175 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

dlcarrier•about 20 hours ago

This was a bug that left it cached on the device. Apple and Google have put themselves in the middle of most notifications, causing the contents to pass through their servers, which means that they are subject to all the standard warrantless wiretapping directly from governments, as well as third-party attacks on the infrastructure in place to support that monitoring.

If you don't want end-to-end messages made available to others, set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.

MisterTea•about 3 hours ago

> If you don't want end-to-end messages made available to others, set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.

Why would an encrypted app broadcast your messages to notifications? That sounds like a failure of the messenger service vendor to secure their app. My banking app requires me to log in to read messages and my account statement EVERY TIME. I get a notification that is just that, notifies me of some pending information, not the information itself.

gruez•about 20 hours ago

> Apple and Google have put themselves in the middle of most notifications, causing the contents to pass through their servers, which means that they are subject to all the standard warrantless wiretapping directly from governments, as well as third-party attacks on the infrastructure in place to support that monitoring.

>If you don't want end-to-end messages made available to others, set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.

This incorrect on two counts:

1. As per what you wrote immediately before the quoted text, the issue was that the OS keeps track of notifications locally. Google/Apple's notification servers have nothing to do with this

2. It's entirely possible to still have end-to-end messaging even if you're forced to send notifications through Google/Apple's servers, by encrypting data in the notification, or not including message data at all. Indeed that's what signal does. Apple or Google's never sees your message in cleartext.

saagarjha•about 18 hours ago

If Signal wants to show you a notification with message text, it needs to put it on the screen through an OS service. That service was storing the plaintext on the device.

avianlyric•about 17 hours ago

Through an OS service yes, but not a hosted backend service. Obviously that service has store the notification in plaintext (although everything on an iPhone is encrypted at rest, but notification crypto keys have to stay in active memory for the lock screen to work), otherwise it wouldn’t be able to display the notification text.

Apple support applications sending encrypted notifications, where the OS launches the app the decrypt the notification body locally and pass it back to the OS for display.

kmacdough•about 11 hours ago

They have to. The device storage is itself encrypted, so the FBI already broke into the phone. When the device is unlocked, notifications are visible by design and therefore available in plain text to the user. The edge case is with disappearing messages, a feature Apple did not build for. The message is intended to be plainly visible to the user, but only for a controlled time on the assumption that the users privileges may eventually be compromised.

This makes for a very odd and specific interaction with a 3rd party feature. Security is a hard problem.

wpm•about 16 hours ago

This is correct, but my understanding of it is that the push notification (which is not the same thing as the actual "Notification" that is shown on the screen) basically contains a "hey $DEVICE, go talk to $APP_NOTO server they got something for you".

APNS just taps on the device's metaphorical shoulder and hands them a courtesy phone "call for you sir"

Vinnl•about 17 hours ago

Yes, but that service is running locally.

dmitrygr•about 15 hours ago

> it needs to put it on the screen through an OS service. That service was storing the plaintext on the device.

Technically, so can the OS's text drawing primitive while drawing Signal's UI.

mdavidn•about 19 hours ago

You are correct, but you omitted one complication: Clients trust Google's and Apple's servers to faithfully exchange the participants' public keys.

pcl•about 19 hours ago

Apps (such as Signal) that care about end-to-end encryption do their own key management. So, Apple / Google servers only ever see ciphertext, and don't have access to the key material that's used for the encryption.

xmx98•about 19 hours ago

Sending public keys through the notification system is an unnecessary complication.

soamv•about 19 hours ago

Which clients?

ls612•about 19 hours ago

Isn’t that what Contact Key Verification solves? Or do I misunderstand how that works?

qurren•about 19 hours ago

... and hold participants' private keys truly private, which you cannot verify without a rooted phone.

totetsu•about 15 hours ago

What about when my notifications are showing up on my MacBook next to the phone via mirroring?

flumes_whims_•about 3 hours ago

Those notifications are transfered peer to peer (from your Phone to your computer) using Apple Wireless Direct Link. The contents are encrypted using AES-GCM.

throw0101d•about 3 hours ago

> What about when my notifications are showing up on my MacBook next to the phone via mirroring?

See perhaps §iMessage and §Continuity in Apple Platform Security:

* https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...

ChadNauseam•about 15 hours ago

talking totally out of my ass, but apple seems to have robust infrastructure for e2ee communication between your devices, for example it is known that location information in find my is not visible to apple. I’d be surprised if the channel to send iphone notifications to your mac wasn’t also e2ee

petcat•about 5 hours ago

> If you don't want end-to-end messages made available to others, set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.

We have no idea if this actually works or even what it does, because we can't see the source code. We just have to take Apple and Google's word for it. Which is not exactly a smart thing to do.

bozdemir•about 5 hours ago

The real question is why iOS caches notification payloads to a persistent SQLite DB in the first place. The notification content only needs to live long enough to render the banner and be shown in the lock screen shade. Persisting it to disk for a month past dismissal isn't a "bug", it's a design choice that someone signed off on. Signal can set UNNotificationContent to show empty/placeholder text, but the default path for any app that hasn't opted out hits this cache. Worth reading the 404 Media piece for the forensic tooling details, this isn't a 0day, it's Cellebrite reading a plist.

chislobog•about 5 hours ago

I’ve been looking into reproducing the extraction of unredacted data. Found this, and it’s speculative, but Magnet Forensics has an internal “infomercial” on reconstructing content from notifications, too.

“find the inclusion of this information interesting because there is a chance that this still contains communications even when the record has been deleted from the sms.db file. I've yet to find definitive proof that this is the case however and it's possible that it is purged at the same time as sms.db is cleared.”

From: https://web.archive.org/web/20220120174606/www.doubleblak.co...

asteroidburger•about 19 hours ago

Both Apple and Google offer the ability for your app to intercept and modify messages before being displayed. Use that to send encrypted messages and decrypt them there, using your own code on the user’s device.

Zak•about 19 hours ago

That framing Makes it sound like the app developer has to do something active to keep message cleartext out of notifications. That's not how it is on Android.

A Firebase Cloud Messaging push notification contains what the app developer's server puts in it. That could include the message body or it could just be an instruction to the app to poll the server for new messages. It has nothing to do with the notification that's displayd on an Android device. Those are entirely local.

An app that cares about privacy wouldn't send anything more than a poll instruction over FCM.

avianlyric•about 17 hours ago

You can implement either approach on iOS as well.

But if you have strong end-to-end encryption for messages, then you don’t have to care about the transport anymore, you assume they’re all compromised. At that point you might as well use the push notification system as your transport, given both OSs allow applications to intercept the push notification locally and decrypt it before it’s displayed to the user.

saagarjha•about 18 hours ago

This has performance/reliability tradeoffs.

ls612•about 19 hours ago

In fact this is what both iMessage and Signal (and maybe Whatsapp too but I can’t tell from a quick google) do.

rubzah•about 6 hours ago

The fact that you received messages at specific times can be enough to identify you, if you have the data from the sending side.

codeulike•about 7 hours ago

From the discussion under this comment it seems its a lot more complicated than that, and lots of people think they know how it works and then lots of other people disagree with them. So all very murky

Schiendelman•about 5 hours ago

Honestly, there are so many good reasons to turn off notifications entirely. Sure, maybe leave them on for phone calls from people you know. But past that, I think getting interrupted by your phone is more trouble than it's worth.

BLKNSLVR•about 13 hours ago

> set your notifications to only show that you have a message, not what it contains or who its from.

I'm pretty sure that's the default in GrapheneOS. Or at least that's how mine behaves.

1r0nym4n•about 17 hours ago

Right, it would be too hard to just have a server send a notification and to jumble that notification locally with the read of the unlocked message without it going through Apple/Google servers.

unethical_ban•about 17 hours ago

Incorrect. At least according to the Matrix (chat) app FAQs I have read recently.

With Matrix apps, certain metadata is pushed from the chat server, to a push server, through Google and then to my device. But the message is not part of that data - it's E2EE. What happens is the app wakes up from the metadata notification, and then fetches the message and displays it in the notification field.

Your last point is correct, at least until/unless this is remedied in Android, too.

sneak•about 13 hours ago

This is misinformation, and is false.

For many apps, they choose to do it this way. For most e2ee apps, they do not. The notification displayed on screen does not need to be the notification pushed through APNS.

Permik•about 9 hours ago

But in the real world, for maximal battery savings and therefore UX, routing any notification data via APNS is recommended.

Fortunately you can choose the payload by yourself and just send a notification "ping" without any data about the messages. But if we're serious about security, you just don't ping the client about new messages because even the time and existence of a notification can be compromising. _The user will know that they got a message, when they open the app and see that they got a new message._

ya3r•about 14 hours ago

Telegram secure chat messages do this by default.

seanieb•about 12 hours ago

Oh please, Telegram being mentioned positively during a discussion of security, privacy or state surveillance? Telegram is a security nightmare, it’s not e2ee no mater what BS their very very untrustworthy founder keeps spouting, it’s not default and what they do offer is probably not secure. Servers owned by Russian oligarchs loyal to Putin. Durovs rebel persona, where he’s persona non grata in Russia is also BS. He was shown to be freely traveling in and out of Russia and having negotiations with the Russian government around censorship of Telegram all while Durov was telling us he couldn’t return. And the Russian FSB won’t use it because it’s known in their circles as being compromised.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2eBDU5ea0A&t=392s

> "That largely depends on what an officer does outside of work. If someone is involved in corrupt dealings, and in fact, I know very few who aren't, then they reason like this. Can this messenger be monitored by internal security officers? Previously, many used WhatsApp. Almost no one used telegram because there's a wellfounded belief that this messenger is to some extent controlled by the Russian authorities. People used signal. Some use three months, but all that has now been shut down again. Why is it monitored? I think they're worried about a possible coup and trying to limit the ability to coordinate mass actions via communication channels from abroad. Hence the Max messenger. So now most security officers have switched to Chatty. That's a Dubai based messenger, but it's definitely not a universal remedy. Some have moved to Zangi, which is [clears throat] an Armenian app that markets itself as American. When it comes to targeting the opposition, the state will always find the resources. It's one of the main priorities, more important than any financial or commercial issue, even more than counterterrorism."

xmx98•about 19 hours ago

You are right in that it is Google’s and Apple’s OS notification api, and we do give them the plaintext messages.

asdfman123•about 19 hours ago

Seems like you should use an app like Signal for anything sensitive at all so you don't have to worry about megacorp ecosystems as much.

jdwithit•about 19 hours ago

As mingus88 said, this story is literally in response to Apple leaking messages sent through Signal. Doesn't matter if the message is securely transmitted if the operating system then keeps it lying around in plain text in a cache.

From the linked article:

> The independent news outlet reported that the FBI had been able to extract deleted Signal messages from someone’s iPhone using forensic tools, due to the fact that the content of the messages had been displayed in a notification and then stored inside a phone’s database — even after the messages were deleted inside Signal.

jameshart•about 5 hours ago

This article is about Apple fixing what they considered a bug, that signal messages were cached locally.

stavros•about 19 hours ago

You can easily configure Signal not to show the message contents if you want, though.

mingus88•about 19 hours ago

Nope, Signal messages were stored in the phones notification DB even after the app was deleted

https://www.404media.co/fbi-extracts-suspects-deleted-signal...

Slash32•about 16 hours ago

totally agree

ryanisnan•about 19 hours ago

This is also an oversimplification. If I understand the issue correctly, the notification with the message contents was what was cashed locally and then accessed. This same vulnerability would exist with Signal if you had the notifications configured to display the full message contents. In this case, it has nothing to do with either Apple or Signal.

6thbit•about 20 hours ago

The "bug" discussed in the article is only part of the problem.

The main problem, which is notifications text is stored on a DB in the phone outside of signal, is not addressed. To avoid that you have to change your settings.

In this case, the defendant had deleted the signal app completely, and that likely internally marks those app's notifications for deletion from the DB, so the bug fixed here is that they were not removing notifications from the local database when the app that generated them was removed, now they do.

  Impact: Notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device
  Description: A logging issue was addressed with improved data redaction.
  CVE-2026-28950

They classify this as "loggging issue" so it sounds like notifications were not actually in the database itself but ended up in some log.

firesteelrain•about 15 hours ago

This tweet seems to imply it’s logs, json, plist and SQLite DB.

Biome — /private/var/mobile/Library/Biome/streams/.../Notification/segments/ — the raw title/body logs

2. BulletinBoard + UserNotificationsCore — /var/mobile/Library/{BulletinBoard,UserNotificationsCore}/.{json,plist} — delivered + dismissed state

3. CoreDuet — /var/mobile/Library/CoreDuet/coreduetdClassD.db — SQLite that re-ingests Biome events

https://x.com/zeroxjf/status/2047081983449178128?s=46

saagarjha•about 13 hours ago

I don’t think they are correct

concinds•about 19 hours ago

You're speculating. "Marked for deletion" could mean after you dismiss it, not just after you delete the whole app.

6thbit•about 18 hours ago

i'll speculate further: it could've been on the dismiss notification code, and when you delete the app the OS dismisses the removed app's notifications, triggering the same code path.

in this case as per reporting, defendant removed the app. unclear if they first dismissed them.

twoodfin•about 19 hours ago

SQLite WAL?

saagarjha•about 18 hours ago

Why do you think they aren't the same thing?

modeless•about 20 hours ago

Oh, I was originally confused about this because I had thought the push notifications were end-to-end encrypted, so they couldn't be cached in readable form by the push notification service, and only decrypted by the app on device upon receiving the notification. But it seems like after the notification was decrypted by the app and shown to the user using OS APIs, the notification text was was then stored by the OS in some kind of notification history DB locally on the device?

saagarjha•about 18 hours ago

Something of that sort.

bigyabai•about 17 hours ago

> I had thought the push notifications were end-to-end encrypted

Much of the metadata is plaintext, in both Apple and Google's Push Notification architecture.

modeless•about 16 hours ago

My understanding is that in Signal's implementation of push notifications the message text is end-to-end encrypted by Signal and decrypted on device by the Signal app. The decryption is not handled by the OS's push notification system.

tadfisher•about 16 hours ago

If I am reading this right, your understanding is incorrect. Signal's "new messages" push message payload is empty. Upon receiving a message of this type, the Signal app wakes up, fetches the actual messages, and (optionally) displays local notifications for them.

At no point does the push message payload contain message text or metadata, encrypted or not.

hurricanepootis•about 2 hours ago

I've used something like this before on my Samsung S24 to see a deleted text from Signal. I checked the notification history and the text was there. Fortunately, Signal has an option to make it where notifications don't actually have the message in it. However, the receiver has to enable that option.

nxobject•about 20 hours ago

Note that Signal offers the option to use generic “You’ve received messages” notifications - it’s good practice in general.

sunnybeetroot•about 20 hours ago

So does every app, go to iOS settings > notifications shows previews > never.

rvnx•about 20 hours ago

Most likely changes the preview on the client-side, but the message is still full on the server-side

ThePowerOfFuet•about 10 hours ago

Signal does not have the plaintext of the messages and therefore could not send it as part of the notification.

solenoid0937•about 11 hours ago

Correct, parent comment is spreading misinformation/false sense of security.

Barbing•about 20 hours ago

Is setting it from Signal directly more trustworthy?

Or maybe it’s impossible for iOS to store the preview content if it never showed in the first place, but not sure if it’s even documented.

elashri•about 20 hours ago

I wish it can be disabled for particular apps and not an all or nothing situation.

Barbing•about 20 hours ago

Can be!

Settings > Apps > choose an app > Lock Screen Appearance: Show Previews - Never

bradyd•about 20 hours ago

That setting is available for each individual app.

thire•about 13 hours ago

That's the first thing that came to mind. Glad that they already thought about it!

doublerabbit•about 8 hours ago

And if you turn off notifications, Signal is more than happy to nag at you for having notifications turned off.

Canada•about 10 hours ago

This is a problem with all kinds of apps. There is no discipline in the handling of user data. Take the notes app. When you delete text it not gone you can still see it in the sqlite database they use for storage. I'm sure this is so they can support sync be recording your changes as CRDTs or something.

And if the app isn't leaky, the OS will probsbly screw you like in this case. The concept of being able to clean up your laptop is just not supported, you have to wipe the whole device which is ridiculous.

shantnutiwari•about 8 hours ago

Nice. Will Apple now also fix the "bug" where you delete a message on your phone, and 3 months later it downloads on your iPad or Watch, and you can never be sure your messages are really gone?

Before anyone asks: No , I didnt turn on any setting to save all my messages to some external server and download them whenever, even if I delete them locally

TeMPOraL•about 6 hours ago

Is it a bug or a feature though? What's more common: wanting to delete a message and have it stay gone, or accidentally deleting the message you wanted to preserve? For most people the latter is more likely than the former.

notTheLastMan•about 4 hours ago

Dear... Apple users really have a different level of loyalty than anyone else.

NikolaosC•about 8 hours ago

Signal deletes the message. Apple keeps the notification that shows the message. For a month. On-device. This is exactly the kind of bug that isn't a bug it's what happens when privacy is owned by the app but the OS isn't aligned.

ChrisRR•about 6 hours ago

It seems so weird that it caches for so long. Notifications are rare enough that you could clean it out of the cache as soon as it's dismissed. It's not like it's something that's happening every few ms

compounding_it•about 12 hours ago

So for third party apps this seems like if you do e2e then along with this bug fix your texts are safe. E2E apps could be independently verified by a third party let’s say.

But what about iMessage. The source code will never be available for neither the servers nor the app.

650REDHAIR•about 15 hours ago

I’m frustrated that Signal isn’t notifying users about this.

I disabled notifications and instead Signal reminded me to re-enable them…

seanieb•about 12 hours ago

The issue is only an issue if your phone is physically taken, then unlocked and the message notifications extracted from a iOS cache database. Todays update by Apple fixes issue for every app, not just Signal.

pixel_popping•about 20 hours ago

In privacy circles, this was always known, as Google/Apple often sends notification content to their servers (which means that it bypass the App realm).

Some people talking about it (different but in the same scope of issue): https://blog.davidlibeau.fr/push-notifications-are-a-privacy...

massel•about 20 hours ago

I expect that Signal encrypts the notification data prior to sending it to Apple, then decrypts it on-device using a Notification Service Extension – this is a common pattern to avoid trusting Apple with any sensitive data.

That would mean Apple stored the cleartext on-device after decryption.

eggnet•about 19 hours ago

Signal doesn’t provide anything in the message other than… “there are pending messages.” Signal wakes up, fetches them, then generates notifications on the phone itself.

6thbit•about 20 hours ago

in the case reported the content did not leave the device. feds retreived them directly from the phone.

rvnx•about 20 hours ago

+ Messengers like Snapchat and WhatsApp;

despite "end-to-end" encryption (for WhatsApp) they are sending copy of some messages based on keywords to authorities, PRISM-like.

Officially to protect kids, but who knows what is in this keywords list.

itopaloglu83•about 20 hours ago

Thankfully Apple backported the fix the iOS 18 as well.

ilikepi•about 20 hours ago

Not only that, but iOS 18.7.8 actually seems to be available to devices capable of running iOS 26 without any workarounds, unlike 18.7.3 through .6. It makes me wonder if those intermediate releases really were supposed to be available but weren't due to some issue on the distribution side that no one bothered to fix.

lynndotpy•about 19 hours ago

Very serious vulns were being exploited in the wild, I think that's what forced their hand. I don't think Apple ever had a discrepancy like the one with iOS 18.7.3 through .6 being held back.

For those on iOS 18, beware that the update to iOS 18.7.8 will toggle Automatic Updates back on. Make sure to switch it back off so you don't wake up to a nasty surprise when iOS 26 is non-consensually forced onto your iPhone.

wao0uuno•about 11 hours ago

I just updated to iOS 18.7.8 and automatic updates are still off. Updates used to enable Bluetooth but event that's not the case anymore.

itopaloglu83•about 19 hours ago

I think that was another attempt by Apple to push users to iOS 26, but after seeing how many people with compatible devices refuse to upgrade, they finally caved in and provided an update.

lynndotpy•about 19 hours ago

They caved, but they're still pulling out new tactics to trick users into installing iOS 26.

The new iOS 18 update will _also_ toggle Automatic Updates back on. I had it happen just now on my 13 Mini against my will. I had to go back into settings and very carefully navigate to disable automatic updates.

layer8•about 19 hours ago

There seems to have been a change of mind, maybe also due to the severity of the exploits. The non-availability of security updates for models that are upgradable to a newer major version has been Apple's practice for many years now.

The way major upgrades are presented in the Settings UI makes it clear that users installing these security updates while not upgrading to a newer major version do so very intentionally. So Apple is now supporting these users deliberately.

trinsic2•about 16 hours ago

I would never rely on a closed system for secure messaging to many unknowns.

exfil•about 11 hours ago

Agree. Peoples are trusting App with unknown source code & delivery path, infrastructure controlled by 3rd party. Application cannot protect against OS and OS cannot protect against HW. Too many known unknowns. Seek the arguments how and why OTF got re-funded last time.

dewey•about 16 hours ago

And yet iOS is probably the most secure mobile platform for secure messaging. Especially in lock down mode.

trinsic2•about 14 hours ago

Except, you cant really verify all of that. so IMHO that's just speculation based on the surfacing of news which can easily be distorted. Or maybe you can. Is there any sources on people that have evaluated the security of these features.

dewey•about 14 hours ago

You can’t verify that even on an open OS as there will still be closed hardware blobs. At least with popular systems there’s a lot of state level hacking activity so zero days get patched routinely. Also Apple has a program for researchers where they get more access to the system (That program was criticized heavily though for the way it was implemented).

It’s not a perfect system so right now you still have to trust someone at some point in the chain.

varun_ch•about 19 hours ago

This makes me wonder: Cellebrite makes tools for law enforcement to break into iPhones, likely exploiting weaknesses/vulnerabilities. Does Apple buy Cellebrite’s tools and reverse engineer them? Or would they not have a way of acquiring them legally?

saagarjha•about 18 hours ago

Cellebrite sells their lower-level devices to Apple directly for things like data transfer at Apple Stores. The ones above that are unlikely to be sold to Apple.

tredre3•about 17 hours ago

> Cellebrite sells their lower-level devices to Apple directly for things like data transfer at Apple Stores.

Please substantiate that claim. Why would Apple need mystical third party devices to transfer data? They've designed both the user devices and the software, and they're both capable of exchanging data, and I'm sure Apple can do even more once they put the devices in diagnostic mode. What am I missing? What is Cellebrite providing here?

avianlyric•about 17 hours ago

Because it’s a pain in the arse to design, manufacture and build a specialist device just for use in your stores.

I’m sure Apple could do everything that box does and more. But why bother designing, building and manufacturing your own specialist device when someone else already sells a perfectly good tool that does the job.

Don’t forget this is for use in a retail store by people who will have been given 5mins training on how to use the device. You want something that just requires a person to plug two phones in and hit a big “go” button. And it needs to work 99% of the time with zero messing around.

saagarjha•about 8 hours ago

Apple was not always a 4 trillion dollar company.

jrflowers•about 17 hours ago

Do you have a link that talks about this in more detail?

saagarjha•about 8 hours ago

Sure: https://www.zdnet.com/article/more-evidence-that-apples-morp.... Also you can just ask people who've worked in the stores: https://old.reddit.com/r/gadgets/comments/sodt49/most_us_cab...

kstrauser•about 16 hours ago

I can’t imagine a scenario where Apple couldn’t legally buy them on the grey market. I can imagine it being illegal to sell them, like contractual restrictions blocking purchasers from reselling them. But short of the tools being a munition or controlled substance, you can buy whatever you want.

bilbo0s•about 19 hours ago

I bet Apple has access to Mythos now.

Not saying they should use it to reverse engineer hacking tools.

Just saying they have access to Mythos now.

klausa•about 14 hours ago

You bet that the company that was prominently mentioned as a parter in the announcement for a thing, has access to that thing?

Wow, such a risky bet, I'm not sure it'll pay off.

samarth0211•about 11 hours ago

That was definitely necessary, becuase the major reason people buy iphones is privacy and security

gsky•about 11 hours ago

have you ever thought maybe Apple is creating a backdoor like this to make secret deals with gov orgs.

trusting a valley company is the last thing you could do since there is a ton of money to be made from selling secrets

random3•about 15 hours ago

Makes you think what’s the biggest concerns wrt Mythos — is it finding or fixing the vulnerabilities that’s scarier :))

kippinsula•about 17 hours ago

every time something like this surfaces I'm reminded how many privacy guarantees end at the app boundary. you can do all the e2e crypto you want, the OS layer is going to do whatever it does with your strings once they hit a render path. probably an unsolvable category of bug as long as notifications need to show readable text somewhere.

riddlemethat•about 17 hours ago

If you want security through obscurity you can revert to IPoAC (RFC 1149).

Razengan•about 15 hours ago

Speech capable avians can spontaneously leak secrets

Razengan•about 15 hours ago

> probably an unsolvable category of bug as long as notifications need to show readable text somewhere.

Let screens always show garbled pixel vomit, decoded on device only by your private AR glasses

kippinsula•about 13 hours ago

threat model just shifts to whoever has a camera pointed at your face, but probably still an improvement.

skrtskrt•about 19 hours ago

It's not new that push notifications should be presumed to be insecure, with their content passing through - and probably persisted - outside the app sandbox and anything in control of in-app encryption.

Apple should have fixed this long ago (not that you can trust a closed system), but Signal should also have strong guardrails & warnings around allowing message content in push notifications.

chislobog•about 17 hours ago

Looking at the detritus in the filesystem on Jailbroken iOS devices you will observe that iOS decides to vacuum, purge, and let linger all sorts of databases and logs until something triggers a cleanup which is usually time or an iCloud sign-out induced erase and subsequent sync. People have been complaining for years about excessive phantom “system storage” and “other data.” Interestingly the photos thumbs database can grow seemingly indefinitely in size for some weeks or more if you’re regularly deleting all of your photos and saving to photos from apps or taking photos. I suspect that there a lot of behavioral data records that is left on most devices until a convenient period of inactivity passes and the possible user behavior analysis and reporting functions of iOS allow whatever cleanup happens after processing on device. It would be useful to capture iCloud backup restores from physical devices to corellium virtual devices with some creative matching of your existing idevices identifiers. Could see what triggers a cleanup during backups, local or otherwise, get a good look at what is being restored from iCloud. I also think it’s possible that iCloud can sync a database, say safari bookmarks, pushing it to the device inducing a state where the device bookmarks are moved to inaccessible tables and left there, unavailable to the end user, but not out of sync with the current active session state. Of course this is just my musing based on observations of weekly ffs extractions of a few devices over the last 5 years.

handedness•about 17 hours ago

My observations from when I daily drove iOS (no more) mirror yours: the incredible amount of cruft that would accumulate was astonishing. At one point I had a device that was majority full of system storage and other data. The same was true across family devices, too.

Some years ago I stopped depending on Apple's purchased downloaded movies for long flights, after an instance of having the files downloaded to the device beforehand, but Apple deciding I didn't have the DRM keys to play said files during a long transoceanic flight. I then moved to storing DRM-free movies in VLC, but iOS prioritized keeping system storage and other data cruft around, and wiped VLC's stored files. Talk about paying for an expensive device and media you don't really own.

I'd imagine the metadata picture that could be synthesized from that data could be extensive in some cases. This stuff is hard and I'm sure there are good reasons for caching things, especially on a device positioned to primarily act as a readily available front end for online stores, but I have a hard time believing that Apple's executing it well.

jameshart•about 5 hours ago

This all seems like a reasonable critique but the idea that the reason for not cleaning up data is so the system can run background behavioral analysis on it seems paranoid. Surely the main reason for not running cleanup until storage is needed is just optimizing for in the moment performance.

maerF0x0•about 20 hours ago

Cat and Mouse, good. This is the adversarial setup that results in a better outcome for all.

unethical_ban•about 20 hours ago

I wonder if the same flaw exists on Android/GrapheneOS.

benjx88•about 16 hours ago

Anthropic Mythos at work! iOS is so good and well built that only 1 bug was found and those patch. "It's either all a joke ... or none of it is." -Bruce Banner

mplewis•about 15 hours ago

What did Anthropic have to do with any of this?

JumpCrisscross•about 10 hours ago

> What did Anthropic have to do with any of this?

To be fair, the day after Glasswing was announced [1] iOS 26.4.1 was released [2]. Three weeks later, we have 26.4.2. When I saw the update prompt, my first thought was security fixes from Mythos. (In reality, the data do not show that Apple is releasing iOS 26 versions more frequently after Project Glasswing was announced than it was before. If we see another release in two weeks, I think we can conclude at least a statistically-meaningful signal.)

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/project/glasswing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_26#Version_history

benjx88•about 14 hours ago

It was an attempt at humor and banter, should've flag that or something.

Fokamul•about 7 hours ago

Who cares, Apple as any other US company must cooperate with "cops" or 3-letter agencies.

Not publicly, of course.

Ask yourself, do you really own your device? Can you access kernel? Can you flash your own firmware on your device? No?

Then you DON'T own it.

jameshart•about 5 hours ago

Apple has repeatedly shown - as in this case - that when police are able to find a way to use their subpoena and coercive powers over Apple to subvert a user’s privacy expectations and extract data from an iPhone, that they see that as a failing of iOS and are willing to fix that bug.

In this case they are patching out a data extraction path that was exploited to access data a user thought had been deleted.

immanuwell•about 9 hours ago

Finally!

j45•about 2 hours ago

A discussion about enshittification might enjoy a late 2025 book about enshittification.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/222376640-enshittific...

joshrw•about 5 hours ago

“Bug”. More like a “bugdoor”

cubefox•about 19 hours ago

It is completely unclear from this article whether this means Apple does no longer cache dismissed notifications somewhere.

ghstinda•about 18 hours ago

I like apple, but would never trust them with privacy. NYPD uses ISMI catchers and other tech. This is a nothing burger or nothing donut.

ratg13•about 11 hours ago

I think people are too focused on the device part of it.

Whatever Apple did to block access to the cache does not negate the fact that these notification messages are still being sent in plaintext through Apple and Google’s servers.

It’s hard to imagine that Apple/Google couldn’t just be compelled to hand this information over if ordered by a court and wouldn’t need your phone at all.

And this loophole possibly only hinges on the fact that most law enforcement maybe never realized this was something they could ask for.

Or perhaps this is happening and the public just doesn’t know it yet.

tcfhgj•about 19 hours ago

bug or backdoor?

6thbit•about 19 hours ago

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

classified•about 12 hours ago

Good. Now, are they fixing any of their other gazillion bugs?

ashishb•about 18 hours ago

This has nothing to do with Apple/Firebase notification service.

It has to do with the fact that any notification displayed on your device goes via a separate system service which was caching them.

It is amusing to see how often people confuse device notifications with Apple notification service.

aucisson_masque•about 18 hours ago

> This was because notifications that displayed the messages’ content were also cached on the device for up to a month.

Why can't we have notification history just like on Android then. It's very useful when you dismiss a notification you didn't want to, or you look for some old stuff.

lynndotpy•about 19 hours ago

Heads up. They have released an iOS 18 update (good!) but, and please bear the caps:

UPDATING IOS WILL ENABLE AUTOMATIC UPDATES TO IOS 26.

(Bad!) This is a new shady tactic they're using trying to get iOS 18 users to install iOS 26.

layer8•about 19 hours ago

This was already the case for 18.7.7. However, after turning automatic updates off in 18.7.7, after updating to 18.7.8 it remained off (reproducibly on several devices I updated). Maybe there is a one-time flag that is set so that after turning off automatic updates after having been turned on automatically, they aren't automatically turned on again on subsequent updates.

lynndotpy•about 18 hours ago

Huh, my experience was the opposite. I don't think Apple undid my setting with iOS 18.7.7, but they did with iOS 18.7.8.

xmx98•about 19 hours ago

Thanks for the warning!

jim33442•about 19 hours ago

Avoid iOS 26 at all costs. I was forced to update to it because I needed to factory reset my phone, and it's super buggy. I'm not even one of those people harping on the Liquid Glass design decisions, those are w/e, the problem is just that the phone routinely freaks out doing basic tasks like trying to open the camera app or close the keyboard. They should roll it back.