2023-12-11 13:39:03
Apple intervened this weekend to block the operation of Beeper, a few days after the launch of this Android app capable of interacting with iMessage. La Pomme declared yesterday that it had “ taken steps to protect [ses] users by blocking techniques that exploited fake credentials in order to access iMessage “. No mention is made of Beeper or its Beeper Mini app, but the target is clear from the message, here in full version :
At Apple, we design our products and services with industry-leading privacy and security technologies designed to give users control of their data and protect their personal information. We’ve taken steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit false credentials to gain access to iMessage.
These techniques posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including potential exposure of metadata and the possibility of spam, spam, and phishing attacks. We will continue to make updates in the future to protect our users.
En face, Beeper ne don’t give up and its manager, Eric Migicovsky, says he has a few possible solutions in store. In a exchange with The Verge he also disputes Apple’s reading on security issues, alleging that Beeper Mini instead allows Android and iOS users to converse more securely than through SMS.
Beeper Mini figured out how to bring iMessage to Android, without security holes
It offers anyone who wants to consult the source code of its app which allows it to pass off an Android device as an iPhone and to use Apple’s push notification service to transmit messages, encrypted, and with a blue bubble color specific to iMessage.
Migicovsky nevertheless concedes that pretending to be a legitimate device, via these blue bubbles, can be likely to mislead the correspondent about the real nature of the sender. This is, among other things, what Apple criticizes. He then proposed the idea of affixing a Pager emoji to each message sent from Beeper Mini to indicate its origin.
Beeper has not yet given up on restarting its service. But it is hard to see Apple doing anything other than blocking each of its initiatives when it has finally agreed to take charge next year of the RCS protocol, successor to SMS, and Brussels does not seem to be going to impose interoperability between iMessage and other platforms.
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