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Comment on Is it safe the new Syncthing-Fork v2.0.14 on F-Droid?

greencoil@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Years ago, official development of an android app of syncthing was abandoned by the official developers. Most android users migrated to an already existing fork by a github maintainer catfriend1.

Catfriend1 unceremoniously disappeared, with their github repositories being taken over by a new user researchxxl. This was entirely unannounced and wasn’t really discovered until people with automatic updates enabled on Unobtanium noticed it.

researchxxl is not a known community member, and is being very reclusive when interacting with the syncthing community. Their github account was made specifically for the repository transfer, and their method of handling existing credentials is suspicious; looking no different than a hostile take over.

At this point in time, they are collaborating with Nexon, a user who worked with catfriend to publish syncthing fork builds to Google Play. They are more well known and trusted. If you can trust Nexon, and trust that end users in general are putting more scrutiny on the github source code after this whole situation, you can probably trust the recent releases for now.

Sorry for any details I may have gotten wrong. AFAIK, no one has taken the time to document all the things that have gone down. I would have linked to such a document otherwise. A lot of the discussion on this is happening in separate discussion threads, one of them being researchxxl’s github issue page, which they are censoring/deleting discussions from with(till recently) no oversight.

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ilmagico@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I don’t use syncthing (anymore) and didn’t know the story behind this, but one thing I know is, f-droid builds the apk from source and signs it with their keys, or if reproducible builds are available, it verifies the signed apk provided by the maintainer to match bit-for-bit with the source code, so at least even if one doesn’t trust the new maintainer, they should be able to trust f-droid that the apk matches the source, so e.g. no spyware or malware was added for example. Sure, someone still needs to review the source, of course.

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- greencoil@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  Thats part of the problem though. Supposedly catfriend1 gave researchxxl their signing keys, and researchxxl used these on their new github account. No one was aware that catfriend1 was not maintaining the repo anymore until users saw unexpected/unannounced updates and looked into the matter. This sparked a short lived discussion on F-Droid forums about what should be done when maintainer transfers are handled poorly like this. F-Droid admins decided that it wasn’t that big of an issue, which is problematic… this supposedly happened between two people meeting each other online and discussing it with each other. But its possible that catfriend1 is being blackmailed or otherwise coerced into handing off this data. This type of credential attack could happen with a compromised machine, without the victim ever realizing it in time. The fact that F-Droid treats this so casually is upsetting. Signed developer certificates protect you from MITM attacks, it does not protect you from the sources themselves being compromised.
  
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  - ilmagico@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Yes, I understand the situation is shady and f-droid maybe didn’t handle it the best way on a human level, and that is important when evaluating trustworthiness.
    
    What I was focusing on was more on the technical side: As long as I can:
    
    trust f-droid to actually build from source and only publish something guaranteed to match the source, and
    
    read the source code myself, or trust an independent researcher to study it, and confirm there’s no malware,
    
    then I don’t need to trust the maintainer of the project at all, and I can ignore all the drama, being assured with a high degree of certainty there is no malware
    
    I can also ignore any drama involving f-droid as long as I still trust them to build from source. This can also be verified by independent researchers by buulding themselves ans comparing, once again filtering out the drama and noise, though most people probably won’t go this far.
    
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  - ilmagico@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    Signed developer certificates protect you from MITM attacks, it does not protect you from the sources themselves being compromised.
    
    Very true, and that’s why f-droid building from source can only guarantee the apk matches the source, but you still need to trust someone else (or yourself) to study the source and confirm nothing shady is going on, which of course isn’t something most people would do for any open source app they install.
    
    Still, for “high profile” cases it just take one (independent) person to go through the source and publish their findings.
    
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Railcar8095@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Unobtanium or obtanium?

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