Re:Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat me...
by modeless on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @05:03PM
(#47869247)
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?
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Re:Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat me...
by bigyabai on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @08:19PM
(#47870928)
> 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.
Re:Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat me...
by modeless on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @08:29PM
(#47870990)
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.
Re:Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat me...
by tadfisher on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @09:05PM
(#47871212)
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.
Re:Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat me...
by thire on Thursday April 23, 2026 @12:25AM
(#47872234)
So that means iOS is caching the local notifications, not the push event... I wonder why it was needed to begin with, especially for a month