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Comment by solarkraft | Hacker News Reader

> Given this MacBook's non-removable storage, Apple must have a new recovery method. Any ideas?

None?

I work at an Apple certified repair center. Theres a tool called the "Customer data transfer tool" that connects to a certain port on a logic board thats hard wired directly into the SSD. On the other side is a USB C cable that is connected to the machine with a new logic board. This will work even if the rest of the logic board is dead, as the SSD circuitry is isolated.

You can read more about it here: https://9to5mac.com/2016/11/24/apple-special-cdm-tool-macboo...

The article explicitly says that port is gone.

Unfortunately this doesn't apply for warranty repairs directly through Apple, as Apple won't bother using this port. They'll just tell you you're SoL and happily remind you of their iCloud services for backups. I had this happen to me on my 2016 TB MBP where the logic board had issues detecting the power level of the battery and wouldn't boot. I knew of the port, and asked them to use it, but their response was that the warranty would only cover like-for-like repairs and that I was responsible for backing up the data. Fair enough, except that Time Machine can and will lie to you about whether it actually backed up the data on your machine. Which is exactly what happened with my machine when I got it back and attempted a restore. Thankfully I had a separate non-Time Machine back up that I could use to bring my data back, but it wasn't fun manually restoring my OS profile and settings. I even managed to get a CS rep to confirm with me over the phone that I was not the only person to have had this happen to them.

Apologies for ranting here; I just hope I can save another person from this BS if they attempt to rely on this port. Through the entire process no Apple rep would confirm the existence of the tool so they made it seem like I was forced to use them for the warranty repair with total data loss.

If I may ask, samcat116, what's the normal procedure for handling warranty repairs at a certified repair center like the one you work at? Is it just labor cost, with parts billed to Apple? And does that include the copying of the data off the SSDs? I'm imagining for warranty repairs the easiest way to handle them is to just swap the logic boards out like Apple does and not bother doing actual diagnosing at the board level like https://www.youtube.com/user/rossmanngroup since the customer isn't paying for parts?

"Recovery" meaning what?

When I went to the Genius Bar because my laptop had WiFi issues, they didn't boot from the internal hard drive, they booted from an external unit that seemed to do way more than just function as a USB-external-HD.

If they mean "self-service" recovery, then I don't know that a soldered hard drive is any different from a removable one. It either works or it doesn't, if it does you can recover from a recovery partition... if it doesn't then you can't recover no matter what.

IIRC, on the 2016 MBP revision, they included a port to be used for data recovery by authorized repair centers.

They appear to have removed that port for this revision.

It's encrypted using the T2 chip (with a key that can't be extracted) so I'm not sure what value getting a copy of the SSD would be. The 2016 MBP did not have this encryption.

with a key that can't be extracted

I'm pretty sure it can, just that the methods are (currently) beyond the reach of DIYers.

Besides, there's probably easier ways... like tapping into the decrypted data. Like any classic DRM scheme, if you have the key and the algorithm, you can get the content. That does not make it easy, but it can certainly be done with enough effort.

> I'm pretty sure it can, just that the methods are (currently) beyond the reach of DIYers.

That would be very huge news worth many millions of dollars as it's the critical piece of iOS device security.

Haven't people extracted keys from TPM chips with electron microscopes? I don't know if the T2 is fundamentally different in some way which would render it immune to such analysis.

>Haven't people extracted keys from TPM chips with electron microscopes?

Once, with one brand, in 2010. And it took 9 months.

That sounds like much to me, with a 2018 mindset. Is it not pretty easy to read out a chip nowadays, even at low double digit nanometer levels?

Something "worth many millions of dollars" will most certainly be kept very quiet by the repair industry, since it can provide recurring revenue (until someone else discovers and reports it to Apple) to an otherwise extremely repair-hostile ecosystem. Bug bounties are a one-time deal that otherwise gives no advantage to the reporter, but unlocking services are not. These people are certainly not looking for a pat on the back from Apple or wanting to make its devices more difficult to repair.

You really think the repair industry is the one sitting on that vuln?

Forget the repair industry, this would be NSA level interest. No one is going to repair your computer using the zero day of all zero days.

Well, if your computer dies, you take the hard drive out and plug it into something else to get your files off of it. Here, your data goes with your computer, it seems.

And, if you work with confidential information, just about any issue would make these machines disposable (even within warranty) if your organization is unable to remove the drive containing said confidential information before sending the unit in for repair.

If you work with confidential information, you should be using strong full-disk encryption. Forget about sending your device for repair - what happens if a device is lost or stolen?

They are using full-disk encryption. But most organizations also have policy that requires removal of the encrypted disk before sending a device offsite for repairs.

Buy a new laptop?

The T2 chip?

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