My only hope they will also fix full disk encryption in this update. Since Big Sur broken installation of macOS on passphrase-encrypted disk partitions.
I bought into M1 hype and now it's end up that you no longer able to have separate password for the disk encryption.
On the internal disk, it's there because they carried over the iOS infrastructure, where your login password is the FDE one.
macOS also now boots before asking for your password, like iOS.
(the OS volume itself isn't encrypted and is read-only, the data volume is encrypted with your password)
I obviously find it being absolutely terrible "design" decision since there no way on earth anyone can count disk encryption key that is unlockable by user password or faceid secure.
PS: If someone have any idea how having separate boot password can be hacked aroud I'll really appreciate the advice.
Was carried over from iOS.
A way to bypass it _should_ be possible, but will entail having the System volume of the volume group to have different properties than the Data part.
Otherwise the OS will fail to load. (on Apple Silicon Macs, macOS is fully booted already when you input the password, so if you encrypt macOS...)
On older Macs, a Preboot UEFI application application prompts you for the password prior to booting.
What you can do as a workaround:
Create a second account which you'll only use to unlock the drive and then run sudo fdesetup add -usertoadd unlockUser and then sudo fdesetup remove -user PrimaryUser. That'll give the rights to unlock the drive only to that unlock user.
You can also use sudo fdesetup removerecovery -personal to destroy the ability of the recovery key to unlock the drive.
Is it possible to make sure that encryption key only available using this "unlock" user passphrase?
What is the privacy implications of two users (both with administrator accounts) sharing an Apple Silicon Mac?
Both users have access to all the data in that case. It got carried over from iOS which didn't have multi-user support.
(and this is by-design, protection granularity is the volume)
Also in case of travel or emergency it's much easier to just power it off. At the same time there is tons of ways how someone can steal your day-to-day lock screen password.
Wait, WHAT? Can someone with an M1 encrypted volume Mac check this directory and see if you see thumbnails?
> $TMPDIR/../C/com.apple.QuickLook.thumbnailcache/
A full writeup of this is at the link [1]. This has been a well-known thing in computer forensics for many years, which is why *full* disk encryption is so important.
This can be disabled through csrutil though.
(E.g. Some Western Digital drives have problems with their hardware encryption and made the data on it irretrievable for many - https://github.com/andlabs/reallymine/issues/53 . More here - https://carltonbale.com/western-digital-mybook-drive-lock-en...).
What is being questioned and criticized is the removal of this choice. Especially when a product claims a commitment to privacy.
If one does not power down your system, your FDE is unlocked. So they only need your Linux user account password to get access to the data on your disk.
FDE only protects your data when it's locked. Normally this is when your system is shut down.
Storage encryption can be attacked differently than a running system.
That's how I set up multiple passwords for FDE on a recent hackintosh build, but I don't have an M1 and this wasn't Big Sur, so maybe I'm missing something obvious that has changed lately and I'm way off-base.
It had to manually be done in that order though, otherwise it defaulted to the user account password for FDE.