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Signal on F-droid Guardian Repo (lemmy.today)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I just noticed today that Signal (not talking Molly) is now available on F-Droid via the "Guardian" repository.

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 hours ago

You can also install directly from Signal via Obtainium. https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/

{"id":"org.thoughtcrime.securesms","url":"https://updates.signal.org/android/latest.json","author":"Signal","name":"Signal","preferredApkIndex":0,"additionalSettings":"{\"intermediateLink\":[],\"customLinkFilterRegex\":\"\",\"filterByLinkText\":false,\"skipSort\":false,\"reverseSort\":false,\"sortByLastLinkSegment\":false,\"versionExtractWholePage\":false,\"requestHeader\":[{\"requestHeader\":\"User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/114.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36\"}],\"defaultPseudoVersioningMethod\":\"partialAPKHash\",\"trackOnly\":false,\"versionExtractionRegEx\":\"\\\\d+.\\\\d+.\\\\d+\",\"matchGroupToUse\":\"\",\"versionDetection\":true,\"useVersionCodeAsOSVersion\":false,\"apkFilterRegEx\":\"\",\"invertAPKFilter\":false,\"autoApkFilterByArch\":true,\"appName\":\"\",\"shizukuPretendToBeGooglePlay\":false,\"allowInsecure\":false,\"exemptFromBackgroundUpdates\":false,\"skipUpdateNotifications\":false,\"about\":\"Signal is an open-source end to end encrypted messaging app.\"}","overrideSource":null}

[–] [email protected] 29 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

It’s weird that this isn’t mentioned on the signal website or blog? They also distribute the binary with a signature you can check there if you want a non-play store source that’s actually verifiable.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

It's probably not an official thing. F-Droid can't distribute apps in the official repo via their own policy if the developer doesn't agree. Third-party repos like Guardian can.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

If it’s not official, how do you verify who is building the binary?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (1 children)

I think they ship prebuilt binaries, i.e. the exact same ones you find on the Signal website

AFAIK this also applies to Tor Browser, Orbot and other third-party apps distributed by Guardian

Edit: I downloaded the files and manually verified the signatures. They are indeed the exact same files.

Because I didn't really know how to grab an APK from the Guardian F-Droid repo, I used their S3 bucket and downloaded the Signal APK. It's named Signal-Android-website-prod-universal-release-7.30.2.apk, which is the exact same file name as the one of the APK you can get from the Signal website.

I then used keytool to print the signature certificate fingerprint: (renamed the files to make it less confusing)

keytool -printcert -jarfile signal-website.apk

Signer #1:

Certificate #1:
Owner: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US
Issuer: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US
Serial number: 4bfbebba
Valid from: Tue May 25 17:24:42 CEST 2010 until: Tue May 16 17:24:42 CEST 2045
Certificate fingerprints:
	 SHA1: 45:98:9D:C9:AD:87:28:C2:AA:9A:82:FA:55:50:3E:34:A8:87:93:74
	 SHA256: 29:F3:4E:5F:27:F2:11:B4:24:BC:5B:F9:D6:71:62:C0:EA:FB:A2:DA:35:AF:35:C1:64:16:FC:44:62:76:BA:26
Signature algorithm name: SHA1withRSA (weak)
Subject Public Key Algorithm: 1024-bit RSA key (weak)
Version: 3

keytool -printcert -jarfile signal-guardian.apk

Signer #1:

Certificate #1:
Owner: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US
Issuer: CN=Whisper Systems, OU=Research and Development, O=Whisper Systems, L=Pittsburgh, ST=PA, C=US
Serial number: 4bfbebba
Valid from: Tue May 25 17:24:42 CEST 2010 until: Tue May 16 17:24:42 CEST 2045
Certificate fingerprints:
	 SHA1: 45:98:9D:C9:AD:87:28:C2:AA:9A:82:FA:55:50:3E:34:A8:87:93:74
	 SHA256: 29:F3:4E:5F:27:F2:11:B4:24:BC:5B:F9:D6:71:62:C0:EA:FB:A2:DA:35:AF:35:C1:64:16:FC:44:62:76:BA:26
Signature algorithm name: SHA1withRSA (weak)
Subject Public Key Algorithm: 1024-bit RSA key (weak)
Version: 3

The fingerprints are identical.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Thanks for doing this!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Takes like 2 minutes 😅

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You have quite a bit of background knowledge to know how to do that though, you should give yourself more credit!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

Thanks, I mean I used to work as a Java developer before, and I'm quite interested in the Android platform, so I'm familiar with the SDK and build tools, and know how app signatures work

But it's really not that hard to figure out. There are countless guides on the internet, and as I said, Signal even has a quick guide for how to verify the APK signature on the download page

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Can confirm, the repository was Guardian Project

[–] [email protected] 8 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I know, it even says so in the post:

I just noticed today that Signal (not talking Molly) is now available on F-Droid via the "Guardian" repository.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Haha it would help if I could read 🤣

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Molly-FOSS is awesome and it now has UnifiedPush support built-in!

Get it with Obtainium

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Woah that's awesome to hear about the FOSS variant. I'll switch over to that version now

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Just make sure to set up UnifiedPush if you want to receive notifications while your Molly database is locked. I recommend the new Sunup UP distributor. I wanted to make a post about it in [email protected], but never got around to do it.

For Mollysocket, there are a few public instances. molly.adminforge.de is one of them. You can also set up your own on Fly.io, check out this repo: https://github.com/pcrockett/mollysocket-fly
Or you can obviously self-host it on any VPS or hardware that you own

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 days ago

Perhaps a result of the proposed ban on distributing tiktok via google and apple is that some developers rethink their distribution mechanisms

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago (3 children)

Is there anything specifically wrong with molly. It seems more locked down by default and is fully open source. Seems better to me.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago

No, nothing wrong with it. I use it actually. People are used to Molly being on F-Droid so I didn't want anyone to think that I was referencing that instead of actual Signal.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

Iirc Molly in F-droid still using FCM and the google maps API. If you want Molly-Foss, you have to use Obtanium to pull APKs from their git releases.

Edit: I was wrong, you can get it off their F-Droid repository.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

No. You can use their f-droid repo to get molly-foss

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

You can also get it from Accrescent

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 days ago

They do not ship updates as fast as official Signal client does. Do not use it unless you specifically need one of its security features

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Please rename the thread to "Signal in the Guardian project F-Droid repo" or something like that to avoid confusion, because as you have noticed, it's not available in the main F-Droid repo, just in the third-party repo maintained by the Guardian project

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Done

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago

Thanks. You can get it by Obtainium too.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (2 children)

I have a tangential question. Would it not make sense for an OS, in this case Android, to have some proper mechanism for installing apps (in this case APKs) directly from a website (as lots of people have been doing fastidiously from signal.org by necessity)?

After all, this is all about trust. With software, assuming that you trust the developer, the goal is to be sure that nobody interfered with the developer's compiled software - and who better to guarantee that than the developer themself, at their own domain? DNS resolution is already based on the "web of trust" principle, which is why you can trust your bank's website. Arguably F-Droid performs a valuable role as a curator and selector of good software, but is there any good technical need for it to actually distribute the software?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Not exactly answering your question but you can use the app Obtainium to fetch the apk URL from a website/github repo and many other sources to install directly. It also supports fdroid repos and many other sources out of the box. Kinda half way what you mentioned in your first paragraph.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Yes true! Forgot about Obtainium. ~~Personally I'm not much tempted because all it does is swap out F-Droid for Github (i.e. Microsoft) as the middleman.~~ But I agree that it's definitely a win for convenience.

PS: Turns out Obtainium is source-agnostic. Good news.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Of course Github is just an example but you can pretty much regex any URL and further filter out anything in order to get the apk link with it. So depending on your level of privacy requirement and trusted sources, you can skip all the centralized ones and build your own list of sources.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

So it does! OK so this is pretty close to a decent solution after all (the ideal one being IMO exactly the same thing but native to the OS). Thanks for the correction.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Thank you for posting the link

[–] refalo 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Not sure if this fits your definition of OS, proper, or install, but FWIW you can already download an apk directly from github using most Android browsers and it will open (or give you the option to open) it with the system's package installer.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Yep and that's exactly what we doing with Signal to avoid the Play Store. It's a bit of a PITA and it's the same on desktop. It's because they don't want third parties maintaining their packages.

My crazy utopian idea is for some kind of protocol (or equivalent) that would allow native package managers (mobile or desktop) to "plug in" to the website repos of authors, directly.

[–] refalo 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Isn't this basically the same thing as clicking a .apk or .exe link in a browser (which already works on mobile/desktop)?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

Other than (a) having to use a browser and (b) no update mechanism, yes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

I was gonna say, I got Molly-FOSS from F-droid, but I actually had to go back and check. It checks out though. I did also get obtainium so I can keep a better eye on updates and actually check the changes on git before updating something as important as secure, encrypted coms. Also I figured I should really start checking the signature each update from now on.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (3 children)

Please forgive if this is a stupid question, but what is the difference between the play store version and this? Assuming it is not altered by a bad actor.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 days ago

As i recall, ALL apps in google play store, have to have some sort of google shit embedded into it. Therefore, its better to download something outside of google if you want to remain degoogled.

[–] refalo 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I would hope the difference is that the f-droid version does not contain any proprietary code.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

No, it's not a special "FOSS" version, it's just the official binary distributed through the Guardian Project repo (as I have proven: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/comment/16230276). If you want a FOSS variant, check out Signal-FOSS or Molly, they also offer a FOSS variant. You can either download it from their custom F-Droid repo, pull the APK from GitHub using Obtainium or get it from Accrescent.

[–] refalo 2 points 3 days ago

Yikes. Thanks for the info.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I think the main difference is that the Play Store version can use FCM (Google Play Services) for notifications, while the APK Signal distributes only receives notifications over a background WebSocket connection.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

That is interesting. Thanks to you and the others.

Does the use of the google play services allow google to sort of…listen in or be privy to your app usage in any way?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Google cannot see any message content of Signal notifications through FCM. It's more like a "heads up" to the Signal app, telling it "hey, there are new messsges. wake up and check what they are.". The Signal app then checks for messages and does all the decrypting and whatnot itself.

While it's possible that the timing of FCM telling the app to check for notifications could be used to correlate activity, that's an edge case that if you are concerned about can be easily avoided by just using the background WebSocket or a fork of Signal like Molly that allows you to use a third-party UnifiedPush provider to check for messages in the background, instead of FCM.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Yes, the activity was what I thought of. Thank you for helping to educate me!