F-Droid

Encrypted SMS and malware scanning

Posted on Dec 28, 2023 by Licaon_Kter

TWIF generated on Thursday, 28 Dec 2023, Week 52

Community News

@Licaon_Kter celebrates:

Jami was updated to 20231221-01 and its developer team is running an end of the year donation campaign, so if you enjoy using it or just want to encourage their work, you can donate here.

Hypatia, a real-time malware scanner, was updated to 3.01 bringing the signature count to more than 6 million and implementing a new bloom filtering processing that will make it load faster and be more memory efficient. But more importantly a SHA1 calculation bug was fixed that made older versions practically broken. It’s recommended to update as soon as possible and to rescan the device.

Silence, Encrypted SMS/MMS conversations made easy!, was unique in its ability to use the forever unsecure medium of SMS/MMS as a way to communicate a bit more securely by implementing the Double Ratchet Algorithm (like XMPP OMEMO or Matrix Olm) for messages exchanges. The app unfortunately has not seen any new development since 2019 but this was not an issue for users wanting it as until recently the app was able to be installed on all devices. Since October 2022 with the launch of Pixel 7 devices, Google set a trend of arm64-only Android versions. Basically until then an app built for armv7 (think Arm architecture but on 32 bit) that worked fine on both armv7 and newer arm64 devices would suddenly not even install. arm64 is supported by Android since version 5.0 from November 2014. The issue was that Silence was built using an older dependency version that did not have an arm64 component, just updating that brought arm64 support (more details here). While the packages were updated, the website and Client dates are still from 2019 so if you already have Silence you’ll not get an update, nor does this impact you. But if you wanted to test if Silence fits your particular “threat model” and you couldn’t (F-Droid would not even show Silence as available for install before this fix), now you can. Note that in my testing 0.16.12, while marked as ‘unstable’ and not offered by default, proved to work better than 0.15.16. Expand Versions in Client to be able to install it.

I’ve said “was unique” about Silence above because a new challenger has joined F-Droid for a while now, Deku SMS was also updated to 0.35.0 this week, but it has yet to prove itself, be audited and implement forward secrecy to be able to be comparable.

@linsui notices that:

Mercurygram, yet another Telegram client fork, was just added. While it has the same issue as the others, namely “creating new accounts in the FOSS version is not possible anymore, you have to create an account in the official build and then login to the FOSS”, it tries to add new stuff too. For example is has experimental support for UnifiedPush meaning it does not depend on any proprietary network services to be able to deliver new messages notifications. Eg. you could get notifications via distributors like Conversations via hosted XMPP servers or NextPush via hosted Nextcloud servers.

Newly Added Apps

17 more apps were newly added
  • Alibi - Use your phone as a dashcam and save the last 30 minutes when you need it (remember Echo?)
  • Arcticons Day & Night - A monotone line-based icon pack for dark & light themed setups.
  • Bluemoon - Privacy friendly menstruation tracking app. Your period, your data!
  • Bluetooth LE Spam - Impersonate Bluetooth Low Energy devices, causing pop-ups on receiving devices.
  • Cooky - Recipe manager: import or create your favorite recipes.
  • Edifier RC10E and RC18A - Unofficial remote control for Edifier speakers.
  • FreeCell4 - FreeCell4 is a patience / solitaire card game.
  • GuessIron - Measure things with your cell phone.
  • Jargons Colombia - Dictionary of Colombian jargon.
  • Libre Memory Game - A memory game.
  • Mirror - Turn your device into a pocket mirror.
  • RiMusic - Stream music from YouTube Music.
  • Timed Shutdown [No Root] - Emulate manual gestures to power off the phone.
  • UVC Camera / Usb Camera custom - Connect to a video camera over an USB cable.
  • Vibrator - Start and stop the system vibrator.
  • trale - A beautiful body weight diary app respecting your privacy.

Updated Apps

128 more apps were updated

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