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Comment by whoknowswhat11 | Hacker News Reader

A better headline - users willing to give up privacy for convenience.

Reality - there was a period where the icloud backups created backups that apple did not have access to. Critically, this mean that if you had any of a wide variety of things happen - unless you were very good about key management - your content was lost for good. ALL your photos (which could be heartbreaking) etc.

It turns out this is NOT what people want. They want apple to have access to their content, so when they have a device stolen and don't have a super long recovery key properly saved, they are not hosed.

Same issue BTW with bitlocker on windows. People DO NOT save those recovery keys, even if they should. Microsoft added a way to force a backup into an account admins and others would have access to, thank goodness, because otherwise users there would be hosed as well.

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They should at least offer users the possibility to get true privacy if they so wish. Blaming the existence of this backdoor on the behavior of the average user is not correct. What's next, selling my data to the highest bidder because the average user doesn't care?

Also, calling this "E2EE" is against the unwritten rules of the profession.

They added back the 'recovery key' feature in iOS 14[0] but I'm not sure if it includes full encryption of backups or other iCloud data. I couldn't find anything on recovery keys in the Platform Security index either[1].

0: https://www.macworld.com/article/234693/apple-id-adds-recove...

1: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web

That option is there, and very simple. You just turn off iCloud backup to get true privacy.

Can I buy a Time Capsule to have iOS Backup then? There are 1B iPhone user, not everyone has a computer for Backup.

No, because if the party you're messaging has iCloud backup on (a good chance), or is on Android, or has their device physically accessed somehow- a third party can read all of the messages that you sent them. There is no 'true privacy'

> No, because if the party you're messaging has iCloud backup on (a good chance), or is on Android, or has their device physically accessed somehow- a third party can read all of the messages that you sent them. There is no 'true privacy'

This is surely true no matter how strong the encryption scheme, though. If you share your content with anyone else, then your security is only as strong as theirs.

Messages are not stored in iCloud Backup by default.

You have to explicitly enable it.

They are actually. iCloud backup stores the messages by default. If you go and set Messages to use iCloud sync, then they're synced end to end encrypted. Apple then removes the messages from the iCloud backup, and instead stores a backup of the end to end encryption key for Messages. If you want your messages to be truly inaccessible to Apple / agencies with warrants (and also unrecoverable after losing end to end encryption access), then you have to turn off iCloud backup.

Apple's documentation needs to be a little clearer on this but the system is basically designed with the accurate notion that the biggest footgun for 90% of users is not "the government was able to access my messages with a warrant" but rather "I lost access to my end to end encrypted messages".

What does Android have to do with anything?

Your messages delivered as standard unencrypted sms/mms instead of encrypted imessages.

What do you define as "standard" on Android when fragmentation is literally the defining point of Android?

Bit of a broad stroke anyway.

Not sure if you're referring to iCloud [device] backup or all iCloud services.

If it's the latter then yes, you can (almost) always choose not to use a service or website. That's a poor argument to defend bad privacy practices.

If it's the former then just disabling iCloud backup does not result in E2E storage of other iCloud data. iCloud photos, drive, etc. are still not E2E.

a) No one is blaming the user.

b) End to end encryption has always meant transport encryption not encryption at rest.

> End to end encryption has always meant transport encryption not encryption at rest.

Sure, but if someone in the middle wants to store, then they don’t have anything unencrypted to store. Ultimately it all depends what one defines the “ends” as. In general for backup, both ends are the user. For chat, the sender and recipient. Apple is not an end, but a provider in the middle.

User A messages user B using iMessages.

User B screenshots all of those messages and uploads them unencrypted to a random FTP server.

Now replace the random FTP server with iCloud. Or Google Drive. Does that change the nature of the messaging between User A and User B? I would say it doesn't. In fact, WhatsApp does basically the same.

No, but it means the backup is not end to end.

End to end encryption usually refers to users being the ends and the service provider being the transport. So while it is sitting on apples servers it is kind of in transport but delayed until you make the request to get it back.

I mean, I'm blaming the user. What's wrong with that in this context? Similarly, if your region hates spicy food and thus spicy is dying in your area, I'd be blaming the region too.

If you think the word "blame" is too morally hot, then we can always go with causal attribution.

a) this feature supposedly exists for the average user who wants to have their data back if they forget their password. Apple points at the user and says they are the reason for having this backdoor.

b) this is just false; whether the data is at rest or not has nothing to do with the definition of the term. And it is misleading in any case.

a) It's not a backdoor but an explicit design tradeoff. It's hypocritical to be calling people out for using terms correctly and then misuse the term backdoor.

b) The etymology of the term has been blurred by WhatsApp referring to it as both transport and encryption at rest. But historically it has not included the latter part.

> It's hypocritical to be calling people out for using terms correctly and then misuse the term backdoor.

No, it's not because it is another instance. Someone can have one thing right and another thing wrong. And whatever the true meaning of "E2EE", its use in this case is misleading at best, so I'm pretty sure that the profession does not approve of it.

> a) No one is blaming the user.

The user is being used as an excuse: "we compromise your privacy because that user over there wants it". This is not blame in the obvious sense of "it's that user's fault that they lost their data", but it is blame: "the responsibility for this thing isn't ours, the people who wrote the code, but yours."

E2ee, transport encryption, encryption at rest and client side encryption are all different things.

OP is quite literally blaming the user.

I once saw the kind of support emails a friend got while working CS for an encrypted media storage service. Every single day, someone new was demanding, many times threatening legal action, that the company recovered their encrypted media. It was set up so only the user had the keys, and there was literally no way for the company to recover data without them - something that was a particular selling point of the service, constantly made explicit in many different ways and places. I wouldn't have believed that things were this bad had I not seen it first hand.

Given that Shamir secret sharing exists, it seems like this should be a problem you can turn around on the user though: instead of just "we'll keep your keys escrowed" it should be "please nominate N trusted friends to recover your keys" with an option (that is highlighted) to let the company be able to do this too.

There's a heck of a lot here which generally feels like a problem where the user isn't ever adequately briefed on what's happening and why, and isn't given reasonable options. People are very familiar with the idea of giving a house key to a friend, but for some reason we don't offer the substantially better options we have in this regard when it comes to encryption.

This is an insightful comment.

Whenever someone loses their account the first thing they do is run to the vendor and flip their shit when the vendor is unable to do anything.

I imagine from a business perspective it’s just better to keep access to data, sometimes without nefarious reasons like advertising, rather just keeping customers happy.

A bit of a tangent, but I happened to flip my shit when my folks laptop was stolen, and the thief placed a password protection on it that Apple refused to lift, despite Apple having the technical capability to do so.

They had records of my folks purchasing the laptop, but they argued that state ID's and credit cards can be faked and stolen, and were thus inadequate for their internal security purposes.

Your post is very light on details. Did they just place a new password on the device itself? If so, you can still use the laptop if you reinstall MacOS. It is only is rendered a brick if the attacker signed into their own iCloud account and enabled Find My, OR the attacker enabled Find My & enabled the recovery key feature on the existing Apple ID (meaning Apple can't let you log into the account without the key).

This was on OS X with one of the older touchbar Macbook Pro models, but there's some kind of password protection which can prompt you for a password before the usual visuals of the OS booting up.

Pretty sure this is FileVault full disk encryption.

And so you can still use the computer just not keep your data.

No, it's also possible to set a firmware password, which pops up if you try to boot from any disk other than the startup disk. If you also can't log into any user accounts on the startup disk, there's no way in!

Apple is right here though.

Those cards are easily forged and there is nothing you can realistically do to prove the laptop is yours without also allowing thieves/criminals to prove it's theirs. And so they have to err on the side of caution.

The onus lies on you to keep backups.

You can't backup a laptop, only your data. The laptop costs a lot. What Apple was "protecting" is the hardware value of the laptop, not any data.

Also, Apple eventually unlocked the laptop.

But you can always boot into Recovery mode and wipe the disk.

In this case you are wanting to keep the data as well.

There was no interest to keep the data, only the hardware, which Apple initially refused to unlock. I wanted my parents to be able to do this via Apple support, and not by themselves.

My experience has been different - Apple support asked me to email them the invoice copy of purchase to verify ownership of an Apple device.

Whenever someone loses their account the first thing they do is run to the vendor and flip their shit when the vendor is unable to do anything.

They certainly turn to Apple for help, but I think it's sometimes simply despair and not flipping their shit.

E.g. I was once in an Apple store and the Genius was trying to help someone who, for some inexplicable reason, did everything in the Guest account of her laptop.

The laptop rebooted for some reason (maybe she said OK to install updates?), and she lost the contents of Guest. Which means she lost everything.

Vendors like Apple need to be prepared for all sorts of data loss scenarios. Ordinary users simply don't think about computers the same way as engineers do.

>I imagine from a business perspective

Regardless of the reasoning, if you have this ability, you can and will be compelled to give up that information. Therefore, it is best to not have that information or STFU about being concerned about privacy.

>Reality - there was a period where the icloud backups created backups that apple did not have access to.

If my memory serves me correct iCloud Backup was designed as such since Day 1 ( iOS 5 ) so Apple could help its customer when they loss their phone. Is there any links to suggest Apple changed their Backup access?

Apple did once plan to allow encrypting backups, but dropped the plan when the FBI complained: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-51207744

I don't think whoknowswhat11's account (that there was a period where backups were encrypted but it was removed because users didn't want it) is accurate.

I dropped my plan to use Cloud Backups when Apple dropped their plan to protect their users. If you want to know it’s safe, either don’t share it with a third party and hang onto that data yourself. Or alternatively, client-side encrypt it to be sure.

I still remember why I had to use iCloud Backup. It was the safest way to restore my data between iPhone upgrade.

I had seen more than a dozen iTunes Backup corruption where the backup is completely useless. And this problem exist even today. And it seems the chances of happening is higher on Windows PC. iCloud isn't without flaws I have seen three iCloud Backup suggesting it is corrupted. But there is often a backup from previous days as iCloud dont overwrite backup. Given the lower chances of happening I had to use iCloud.

I’ve never once used an iCloud Backup or even local backup between iPhone upgrades. I always set it up as a new phone and don’t migrate any old settings across.

I make the odd encrypted local backup just as a recovery point but my RTO is measured in years TBH.

> Same issue BTW with bitlocker on windows. People DO NOT save those recovery keys, even if they should. Microsoft added a way to force a backup into an account admins and others would have access to, thank goodness, because otherwise users there would be hosed as well.

I know someone that got a drive recovered once and they had no idea what BitLocker is. They were pretty happy to have the key saved in their MS account.

I had this happen to me once on my Surface Go tablet. I had no idea that BitLocker was enabled, whether I did it at initial setup and didn't remember or it was on by default. One day it refused to boot until I entered a key that I had no idea even existed. Fortunately, I was able to log in to my MS account and retrieve the key.

Bitlocker (enterprise setup) is different, you can backup into AD, and also have network unlock (requires a connection to dc that’s wired)

However I agree, I heavily use iMessage, it’s convenient because when I used signal I didn’t get notifications.

However, Apple has had the decryption keys server side for ages, and I believe the reason they don’t have E2EE is purely because users don’t store their backup keys, and kick off when they loose all their life that’s stored in iCloud, and it’s just not worth the hassle to the support team, my family is the same with 1Password, they don’t backup their secret key thing, so I have to either store it or restore their account.

Bitlocker doesn’t help in this regard either, you can bypass the mandatory saving section by using print to PDF to store the recovery file to the encrypted drive, essentially locking a safe with the key inside.

You're conflating the convenience of backing up vs being able to access data even with lost recovery keys.

People are certainly choosing convenience over privacy in that any backup is preferable to no backup.

However, Apple does not give the option to choose E2E or not so users cannot make that choice of privacy vs convenience. You're assuming that people choosing iCloud over not-iCloud means people do not want E2E. It may be the case that people prefer E2E but this is not evidence of it.

Furthermore, I don't believe iCloud backups were ever E2E and that it was a feature that was removed. Apple states which iCloud services are E2E[0] and these services I'd argue are pretty straightforward to setup and not lose. Most of the time you don't need a recovery key, just to be logged in on another device.

Even if it is the case that most users do not want E2E, there's certainly a large audience (outside of just the HN bubble) that do want it. They could make it optional.

[0]: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

> Users willing to give up privacy for convenience.

It’s not possible to give up that which you do not have. And the convenience isn’t for the users

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That's essentially a "Switzerland bank" from the movies that keeps a box on your behalf and doesn't ask silly questions. So I wonder if there's an unfilled niche of such "data storage bank" where you give them a blob of data, they store it for you and you trust them not to look inside. This could be also a useful application of those NFTs: an NFT contains a key and by nature of NFTs, the key has one owner at a time and the key is also transferrable.

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