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Comment by bananabreakfast | Hacker News Reader

This is not true. Don't spread FUD. Apple does not have the ability to read your messages. All messages stored on their servers are encrypted with keys that live only on the phone.

iMessage doesn't store your decryption keys on Apple's servers unless you opt into iCloud backup which is a whole different service and security concern.

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Most people use iCloud backup. Even if you don't, your messages are still sent to Apple by the recipient. And Apple prohibits third party backup services.

> Apple does not have the ability to read your messages.

iCloud backup is an Apple service and it has the ability to read most of your messages even if you don't use it, which makes this statement categorically false.

This is completely ridiculous. iMessage is encrypted by my device and remains encrypted until it gets to the recipient device. That is what end-to-end encryption means.

That I may have given Apple my private key through a different message in no way affects that end-to-end encryption, because it is trivial to decide not to give Apple that key.

iCloud isn't some separate entity from iMessage. It's all Apple. And you have no option to use a different cloud backup provider.

You can decide not to give your keys to Apple, but you can't decide for all your friends to not give their keys to Apple, and the result is the same: Apple can read your messages.

And the marketing is so misleading that hardly anyone knows that Apple can read most iMessages.

Got any sources for that? Sounds a lot like FUD.

Sarcasm critique: I think a quote would make it clearer:

> > iCloud isn't some separate entity from iMessage. It's all Apple.

> Got any sources for that? Sounds a lot like FUD.

Not sarcasm. Sources please.

Let's not use sarcasm or sources..... Let's puzzle it out.

You don't use a password to encrypt your iCloud backups... They're specific to the hardware your backing up. If you have an itouch for example it's backups are separate from your phone.

So now you have these backups in the cloud and you lose your iPhone, you remote wipe it.

Now your new one arrives and you restore from backup... Your iMessage private keys are available to apple unencrypted .... Because you didn't need to provide a second factor of authentication for unlocking the backup you were just asked which one to use.

Apple and any reputable nation-state can read your iMessages with a subpoena ... If you use iCloud backups and not local backups with a password.

1) No such thing as an “itouch”

2) What about your iCloud account and password that are required to encrypt, store, access, and decrypt the backups there? Is that not a factor worth consideration?

Your password is not a factor worth considering. You can ask Apple to change it. That means they have the ability to change it. That means they have access.

> nation-state

I wish this meme of trying to sound fancy by misusing the term "nation-state" would die.

"If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices."

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Sorry, let's be explicit here, as you seem intent on muddying the issue. Where, other than the endpoints, is the message decrypted when people use iMessage? Your succinct answer to that will clear this up for everyone.

On GCBD's servers in China. Possibly on Apple's servers in the US if they are running a wiretap. Due to the way key distribution works for iMessage, it is trivial for Apple and GCBD to do so.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22755903

Your message, through several layers of indirection, relies on a security conference paper from 7 years ago[0] + the assumption that Apple haven't updated the protocol in 7 those years.

[0] https://blog.quarkslab.com/imessage-privacy.html

No, my message relies on the fact that people have been looking at iMessage for years, and nobody, least of all Apple, has said that the implementation changed in any way to prevent Apple from viewing the messages.

Here is another article from 2016, which shows that Apple patched iMessage to prevent attackers who don't have access to Apple's servers from reading the messages but still kept the ability to read the messages themselves. https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/category/imessage/

Apple was aware that people knew it could decrypt iMessage messages this entire time, but Apple made no changes that would fix that. That should give you some idea of whether Apple intends to ever fix that.

Apple can, of course, do whatever it likes, up to simply recording the screen and sending that to weird & wonderful government agencies. Like almost everything in mainstream security, it comes down to who you trust. It doesn't mean it isn't E2E though.

> It doesn't mean it isn't E2E though.

E2E encryption simply means that messages are only decrypted at the endpoints. That certainly isn't true of iMessage in China, and it might not even be true for some users in the US — we have no way of knowing because the protocol makes no guarantee against it.

So basically the first and second parties themselves need to do all encryption and decryption without any help from the third party running the service. Which is the age old usability issue famously holding back the casual adoption of PGP. Hard enough with text... To do it with video conferencing would be quite the feat. Someday, though.

I have linked it several times in this thread. Here it is again:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

Sorry, and where exactly outside the endpoints are the messages being decrypted?

Only Apple can know exactly when or where or how often they decrypt people's messages from their backups, because once they have the keys they have the means to do it at any place and time, for any reason, without anyone's knowledge or consent.

What we know is that they can and do decrypt iMessages from iCloud backups in response to law enforcement requests[1]. This proves that they hold the keys, if their own support pages weren't enough evidence for you.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

And even if none of that were the case, couldn't they just push out an update to the app or OS (just to the target, so other researchers debugging or watching traffic wouldn't know) which would cause the device to exfiltrate the cleartext anyway? Or always have had said feature?

This is both true and false. Apple stores keys on the device so they can't read your old messages, but say they want to start reading messages of a particular user, they can simply issue a new key and store it on the device and the server and start decrypting the new messages using it.

This is why WhatsApp for example notifies users when the key of the recipient changes, and they give you a way of verifying that the both keys at both ends are identical.

iCloud Backup is opt out, not opt in. Apple has backed up iMessage keys for the vast majority of its users.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Tuxer said "keys," not "your decryption keys." Apple distributes the public keys that each party encrypts their message with, and they route the encrypted messages through their servers. They can trivially eavesdrop on conversations by simply providing a key from a key pair they generate to a participant and reencrypting messages using the other parties' public keys after deciphering the messages.

https://threatpost.com/apple-imessage-open-to-man-in-the-mid...

As a user, this is impossible to verify.

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