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Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

On the face of it, this is true. Since most people enable iCloud backups of messages, which are not encrypted, you should basically think of iMessage as unencrypted, unless you are very sure both you and the person you are messaging do not have iCloud backups enabled.

On the other hand, I'm not sure how much to trust Zuck's claims of WhatsApp encryption, or if external people have attempted to verify the claims, but it seems like such a big deal to lie about, that it's probably true?

Of course, that's only going to provide you passive protection from things like automated scanning of messages. If you become a target, it seems as though there are always exploits floating around which can be used to hack your phone, and then all bets off.

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There was an external audit in 2021 – https://research.nccgroup.com/2021/10/27/public-report-whats....

WhatsApp backups also aren't encrypted by default. You need to turn that feature on manually.

iCloud backups are encrypted, just not end to end. Which is as good as not encrypted.

How good it is depends on the actor/threat model. I'd say that server-side encryption is always a good thing when you include someone trying to steal disks from a SAN array to see if there's tasty data on it.

On the other hand, if your adversary wants to get your stuff, they will find a way. The whole cryptography thing is just imposing cost on a potential attacker, not a universal warranty against any possible attack. Someone can still locate you and beat you with XKCD's $5 wrench for your password.

Ideally we'd have end-to-end encryption on everything without adding complexity for end-users. But a lot of that stuff seems to be hard to build and at least just as hard to retroactively bolt on to a system. iMessage (iChat) goes back a long time and supports many platforms (yes, within the apple ecosystem, that is) which means they can't easily nuke every legacy API at once.

> if your adversary wants to get your stuff, they will find a way.

This is true, and to add to it: for state level actors, “wanting to get your stuff” expands to passive collection of data as well as well trodden paths to more targeted surveillance. End to end at least throws up a few more barriers.

They are end to end encrypted, but you are not the only one holding the key. So although you can’t see for yourself, Apple does control who gets to look and there is no analytics going on.

And you can of course always chose to run local, encrypted backups.

They are not end to end encrypted, per Apple’s KB entry here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

True, it depends on what you consider the ends. If you consider the ends to be the device and the storage, it’s encrypted all the way. But if you consider the ends to be the original device and the new device, it is not end to end encrypted because indeed Apple does have access to the key and password recovery is possible. But it is encrypted so it is possible to control and log who has access, IE not any random developer, support person or analytics system.

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