Apple introduces end-to-end encryption for backups

Advertising does not require that you spy on each individual person.

Google, for instance, used to show you ads based only on your search keywords.

We don’t know that. We know that they put ads in the App Store, that’s it. I wish they did not, because it made the store even more of an unusable mess, but it really is not even in the same league as Google and Facebooks, systematic surveillance.

> increased pressure to sustained growth from shareholders

This sounds truthy, but is there any evidence of this? Apple is famously the company that tells rent seekers after more ROI above all to fuck off (both Jobs and Cook).

> I'm advocating for an open and interoperable ecosystem of operating systems, services and applications, which is the only way to ensure sustainable customer freedom.

Now that’s a real point, which deserves more than being buried after a paragraph of half-truths (and I almost entirely agree, FWIW).

> It's good to be passionate, but blind devotion is dangerous,

After starting a post like this, it is disappointing that you fell in the trap you warned the OP about. Being contrarian and using mis-informed tropes is not a good way of having a rational discussion. It is not being cool or clever at all.

Do we though?

Or they could sell us a rugged iPhone with a removable battery and SD card slot to extend storage but keep the proprietary OS to keep the music/movie ppl happy plus keep out malware not sent via FISA warrant, but if they did that Tim Cook might jump off the top of the donut apparently, so they keep going the way you describe.

We aren’t talking about blind devotion, though, are we?

We have a tangible actual important thing. Apple can’t plumb our backup data for their own profit.

You want to be careful not to ignore information just because it doesn’t comport with your preconceived assumptions. At least consider weighing them against your assumptions? I’m never going to be against a cookie-based metaphor, but that doesn’t make it apt.

Agree with you there -- the data might be encrypted on Apple's servers but that doesn't mean Apple can't scan your data on your device and report the findings back to the mother ship. They've made it increasingly difficult to know or control what system processes do.

There's a fundimentally different approach to advertising by Apple than say, Google or Facebook. For one thing Apple isn't doing web ads. They've not got an adsense style platform and likely never will.

The ad network they're building is for inside their own apps, and likely eventually for app developers to integrate into their own apps - apps only.

In addition those ads are for items within their existing ecosystem, ie more apps.

In terms of data collection this means they dont need the insane levels of information that Google and Facebook collect. All they need is a rough idea of your interests, which can be gained from the apps you use, and your activity in their own apps. Everyone using an Apple device must know they store your location, so that ones an obvious no brainer.

They dont however need to know your browsing habbits. Would it help target better? Absolutely, but the whole aim of their ad network is to keep you inside apps, not browsing the web. If you're using Chrome, Safari, etc they cant advertise to you as again, its not a web-based ad network.

As data collection goes, the way they're doing it is about as least intrusive as you can get. Theres no following you around the internet going on, which has always been the biggest issue with Google and Facebook.

I'm not saying Apple is a 'saint' in all of this, but its not even close to the level of tracking other companies use.

That is no longer the case. There are projects starting to come out which are open source and building on top of AOSP like GrapheneOS, CalyxOS and a few others but those two are solid options at the moment.

I am not sure why GrapheneOS doesn't get mentioned here on HN but it's seriously a wonderful project that includes privacy features not available even on iOS. They are this far ahead of the game when it comes to privacy and security. Highly recommend checking them out.

https://grapheneos.org

Sure, if you're so laser-focused on privacy that you want some obscure phone which will do nothing aside from text, call, and send Signal messages, go buy the weirdest one you can find. otherwise you won't be finding anything remotely enjoyable if it's not iOS or a major android flagship. And out of those options, only one respects the user's privacy and security.

They do make a family plan for Apple Plus ($30/month) fairly compelling: 2TB per family member, Apple TV both has some good original content as well as serving as a quick index into most other stream services, the Arcade Games are fun enough, Fitness+ is something I use about 90 minutes a week, and Apple Music. That is a lot of “stuff.”

Then there are some things that Apple gives away for free. Their podcast app is free and lets you subscribe to a lot of interesting stuff that I might otherwise subscribe to Spotify for. Handoff saves me about 5 minutes a day. Anyway, I don’t much like the walled garden aspect of Apple, but for value and convenience they must be difficult to compete against.

additionally, as far as i can see, those apps all free to download and you can buy their plans outside of the apple ecosystem and thus they get a free ride in the App Store without giving away any cut to apple.

You pretty much have to be on their store to sell something, which means you give them access to your sales and customers. Which is a concept that is absolutely wild in any normal healthy competitive landscape.

Then they'll monitor and if you manage to actually be successful, 3 months later there's an Amazon Basics version of your product.

It's so incredible to me how these practices get no push-back. There used to be a time where in the case of Windows, people were wondering if its fair that they ship it with a calculator program. Now you can just use your massive platform and extend in every possible direction, seize secondary markets, nobody seems to care.

It's fine that very few people care Apple is very good at attracting customers without it anyway, so it's not the classical situation where we, tech people should feel sorry that non-tech people "just don't get it" and don't use Apple services.

And lastly, if indeed no customers care, then that speaks for even bigger respect toward the individuals working at Apple who pushed for this and made it happen. (But I think Apple believes this will be a good business decision, not altruism.)

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33898890.

> Can't put custom apps on devices easily.

You will, from May, thanks to the EU Digital Markets act.

> [...] simple tasks like....copying photos to a usb...browsing files on my phone on a pc.

You can do this with ifuse: https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse

Obviously the commenter is talking about the new E2EE plan. No way to scan it then, under they do it on device, which they also walked away from.

Apple was developing this technology, but they dropped their plans.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/7/23498588/apple-csam-iclou...

We don’t cry over bitmaps vs vector graphics in most contexts, especially that the hardware is trivially limited. It’s probably a bit more nuanced with speakers, but I imagine that they also have very real limits on distinguishable outputs for a given input, even if it is not as trivial to see as in the case of a w*h pixel grid of depth n.

my comment was that against main stream companies apple leads the way, and it's overall great for a consumer.

do you personally expect every piece of open source software? do you run your own email servers, music servers, photo backups, etc.? If not, you somehow trust those companies -- why?

In particular, reviewing open source code has been repeatedly proven to be way harder of a task, than the proponents of this strategy are painting it to be. If you want an auditable codebase, you pretty much have to throw Linux, Chromium/Firefox, Gnome/KDE all out the window - there's just way too much code.

Auditable code is naturally always preferable to non-auditable, but you need to choose your trade-offs - or at least stop pretending you can read a hundred million lines in your life time.

On top of that - do you know a single non-tech person who knows how to set up a VPS, or knows what Veracrypt is? OTOH I can just show my wife: click here to enable backups.

Let me reframe the problem: What is your threat model? How much effort are you willing to commit to mitigate the dangers?

The Free Software world has had ample opportunity to produce something as carefully assembled, as smooth, and as capable as iOS, and what we got instead was Android.

I've watched the whole FOSS world happen in my career, and there are places where I cannot IMAGINE choosing a closed source solution, given my druthers. But it's also become super clear to me that the FOSS world isn't interested in producing polished user experiences. Sure, you or I could cobble together a FOSS-only phone-and-syncing stack, I guess, but I don't care to. Most people aren't us; doing so is beyond them.

Suggesting a normal person use something OTHER than iOS at this point is questionable at best.

Notably, the only other serious competitor in the space is also not open source. Sure, you can probably carefully construct a phone from only FOSS, with some compromises of course. But this is unfeasible for regular users, who have for all practical purposes only two choices. And those same users are unlikely to go for alternative replacements for built-in functionality just to reduce their exposure. Convenience wins every time.

The other really annoying thing is you pay $3/m for 200gb or $10/m for 2tb… there’s no middle ground, I’d like to pay $4 for 500gb or $6 for a tb.

Can I buy something from my local supermarket without them knowing what I bought? Can I create an EC2 instance on AWS without Amazon knowing who created the instance?

I don't like a super powered monopolistic company as much as the next guy and I totally agree that ads situation in App Store is not a straight business but come on.

Some people want to use their computer completely privately and that's totally fine, but when you are using a cloud service, they probably will know how you use it. What they do with that data and how they handle it on the other hand is of importance. The problem with the whole tracking fiasco starts when the provider sells your data or "access", collected using dark patterns for example to others.

How will they do recommendations if they don’t keep track of what you listen to? How will they do recently played lists?

How will they know if they should send notifications to your phone for your apps if they don’t have a record of what apps you have installed? All notifications are bundled together and sent from their servers to save battery life.

what you're describing is not the norm and those options should always be available, but the effort to value is simply not there to large portions of the mobile users.

I wonder if this is literal; otherwise they wouldn't achieve any de-dupe if you just rename the file.

Is there any proof they actually abandoned this? NeuralHash seems alive and well in iOS 16[1]. Supposedly the rest of the machinery around comparing these hashes to a blind database, encrypting those matches, and sending them to Apple et al. to be reviewed has all been axed. However that's not exactly trivial to verify since Photos is closed source.

[1]: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/find-and-delete-dupli...

Although it was starting on CSAM material, it wasn't clear which other illegal activities Apple would assist governments in tracking. In countries in which [being gay is illegal](https://www.humandignitytrust.org/lgbt-the-law/map-of-crimin...), having Apple employees aid law enforcement by pointing out photographic evidence of unlawful behaviour (for example, a man hugging his husband) would have been a recipe for grotesque human rights abuses.

With photos encrypted, Apple can't be pressured to hire human reviewers to inspect them, and thus cannot be pressured by governments that enforce absurd laws to pass on information on who might be engaging in "unlawful" activities.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/apples-plan-think-diff...

Unfortunately, I think the privacy problems surrounding iCloud Photos remain to an extent.

There is no way for a user to verify if Apple has actually end-to-end encrypted their backups or not.

The presentation about ZFS' native encryption[1] covers many of these sorts of trade-offs necessary to do full-disk encryption at scale.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frnLiXclAMo

If someone has all kinds of duplicates, so what? Eventually, they have to pay and up their subscription price for the additional cloud storage. The only way de-duplicating could possibly save money is if two or more people with the same file are both pointed to that same file in a location that is not within their account.

I don't buy this de-duplication argument.

Use your own server? Great, it's secure software-wise, but if someone broke into your house, it's all of the sudden the worst liability ever. The next thing you know, your entire identity, your photos, everything is stolen. You have excellent technical security, perhaps the weakest physical security.

So new plan, you use a self-hosted NextCloud instance on a VPS somewhere. That's actually not much smarter than using iCloud - VPSs handle data warrants all the time. They also move your data around as they upgrade hardware, relocate servers, and so forth.

So new plan, you use iCloud E2E encryption. You have to trust that Apple does as they say, and trust that their algorithms are correctly functioning. Maybe you don't want to do that, so new plan:

You use a phone running GrapheneOS, with data stored on a VPS, with your own E2E setup. Great - except you need to trust your software, and all the dependencies it relies on. Are you sure GrapheneOS isn't a CIA plant like ArcaneOS was? Are you sure your VPN isn't a plant, like Crypto AG? And even if the VPN is legitimate, how do you know the NSA doesn't have wiretaps on data going in and out, allowing for greatly reducing the pool of suspects? Are you sure that even if the GrapheneOS developers are legitimate, the CIA hasn't stolen the signing key long ago? Apple's signing key might be buried in an HSM in Apple Park requiring a raid, but with the GrapheneOS developer being publicly known, perhaps a stealth hotel visit would do the trick.

So new plan, you build GrapheneOS yourself, from source code. Except, can you really read it all? Are you sure it is safe? After all, Linux was nearly backdoored with only two inconspicuous lines hidden deep in the kernel (the 2003 incident). So... if you read it all, and verify that it is perfect, can you trust your compiler? Your compiler could have a backdoor (remember the "login" demo?), so you've got to check that too.

At this point, you realize that maybe your code, and compiler, is clean - but it's all written in C, so maybe there are memory overflows that haven't been detected yet, so the CIA could get in that way (kind of like with Pegasus). In which case, you might as well carefully rewrite everything in Rust and Go, just to be sure. But at that point, you realize that your GrapheneOS phone relies on Google's proprietary bootloader, which is always signed by Google and not changeable. Can you trust it?

You can't, and then you realize that the chip could have countless backdoors that no software can fix (say, with Intel ME, or even just a secret register bit), so new plan. You immediately design and build your own CPU, your own GPU, and your own silicon for your own device. Now it's your own chip, with your own software. Surely that's safe.

But then you realize there's no way to verify, even after delidding the chip, to verify that the fabrication plant didn't tweak your design. In which case, you might need your own fabrication plant... but then you realize that there's the risk of insider attacks... and how do you even know those chip-making machines are fully safe? How do you know the CIA didn't come knocking and make a few minor changes to your design, and then gag the factory with a National Security Letter from giving you any whiffs about it?

But even if you managed to get that far, great, you've got a secure device - how do you know that you can securely talk to literally anyone else? Fake HTTPS Certificates from Shady Vendors are a thing (TrustCor?). You've got the most secure device that is terrified to talk to anybody or anything. You might as well start your own Certificate Authority now and have everyone trust you. Except... aren't those people... in the same boat now... as yourself... And also, how do you know the NSA hasn't broken RSA and the entire encryption ecosystem with that supercomputer and mathematicians of theirs? How do you know that we aren't using a whole new DUAL_EC_RBG and that Curve25519 isn't rigged?

The rabbit hole will never end. This doesn't mean that we should just give up - but it does mean we shouldn't be so ready to nitpick the flaws in every step forward, as there will be no perfect solution.

Oh, did I mention your cell service provider always knows where you are, and your identity, at all times, regardless of how secure your device is?

Edit @INeedMoreRAM:

For NextCloud, from a technical perspective it's fantastic, but your data is basically always going to be vulnerable to either a technical breach of Linode, an insider threat within Linode, or a warrant served (either a real warrant, or a fraudulent warrant, which can happen).

You could E2E encrypt it with NextCloud (https://nextcloud.com/endtoend/) which would solve the Linode side of the problem, but there are limitations you need to look into. Also, if a warrant was served (most likely going to be authentic if police physically show up, at least more likely than one they served your data over), you could always have your home raided, recovery keys found, and data accessed that way. Of course, you could destroy the keys and only rely on your memory - but, what a thing to do to your family if you die unexpectedly. Ultimately, there's no perfect silver bullet.

Personally... It's old school, I use encrypted Blu-rays. They take forever to burn, but they come in sizes up to 100GB (and 128GB in rare Japanese versions), they are physically stored in my home offline, and I replace them every 5 years. This is coupled with a NAS. It's not warrant-proof but I'm not doing anything illegal - but it is fake-warrant-resistant and threats-within-tech resistant, and I live in an area where I feel relatively safe (even though this is, certainly, not break-in-proof). Could also use encrypted tape.

You can, with some inconvenience, use optical diodes to transmit data from a trusted input device to an untrusted network device for transport over tor, and then push the received messages over a second diode to a display device that decrypts the messages, so that even if you receive an exploit/malware, there is no physical connection that allows unencrypted data to be exfiltrated.

https://github.com/maqp/tfc

Tbh in theory apple aren't allowed to tell you they have done it or otherwise. So their phones have probably been backdoored for a few years now at request of aus gov.

That's not really true if Apple also holds copies of your iCloud decryption keys. If they want to access your data, they already have all the necessary components.

These protections aren't there to protect you from "Apple", but Apple staff.

So for example if someone at Apple has been compromised by a foreign state, they can't copy sensitive customer data just willy nilly. They'd have to jump through a lot of hoops that would be prohibitively difficult.

Google had issues like this in the past where some employees were sending data to the Chinese government. E.g.: information about dissidents, political opponents in Taiwan, etc...

This is one of the reasons Google encrypts even internal server-to-server traffic, because the threat is on the inside of the firewall!

Remotely deleting probably just exposes them to all kinds of legal issues, since it would wipe user data too (which you can otherwise possibly still extract, e.g. through the "Files" app).

This is now possible to achieve in AWS, for example.

If only such a service existed.

If only …

remember Lavabit [0]? will Apple choose to shut down rather than to comply [1]? if the government comes with a warrant, it will be with a gag order, and they will be compelled to silently update your phone to extract whatever the govt needs over the course of a few months.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register#Pen_Register_Act

There isn't another mainstream product that offers that.

While waiting for them to latch you down tight, you could have already been enjoying the most consumer-centric and privacy-conscious mainstream mobile OS since 2007.

I've enjoyed 15 years of a wonderful and privacy-first device ecosystem. They're evidently making it even better. And you want me to be upset?

What am I missing? How am I handcuffed to Apple?

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

I mean, I really emjoy my current Apple ecosystem, and I do have all the devices, and I like how everything works currently. But, a switch is mainly a matter of movies my files and exporting/importing photos, contacts, and email. It might take a few years to cycle out ALL the devices, but I don't feel like there is a ton of friction in switching my data over.

It is more that everything is working so well together that I don't want to switch right now.

I do stay away from Apple home automation though, for this very reason. I want something open and local that I control since that WOULD be a huge pain to try and swap away from.

This is about trust. If you don't trust the manufacturer of your hardware (or developers of software), that puts you down a very specific path of what you can happily purchase.

When you send your group iMessage of 30 people the same photo, apple is not storing 30 copies of it, but, one.

If there is a "Revolution Plan (WIP)" document shared amongst a few agitators, and someone in power gets their hand on it (and its "checksum" or whatever), then can they figure out _who else_ has it?

At the same time, I log in to new iOS devices with my Apple ID about once per year. I would love to be able to use a high-entropy key in that scenario. (As a point of reference, WhatsApp allows exactly that for encrypted backups!)

If that's still baffling to you, I'm glad I could introduce you to a very different viewpoint :)

I want to be asked for it if and only if I grant a new device access to my end-to-end encrypted iCloud data.

I don't think this is an absurd demand. WhatsApp supports this security model, for example. Evem Apple used to, before they forced every iCloud keychain user to switch to their HSM-based model!

Users shouldn't be forced to use high-entropy local passwords just because a service provider insists on reusing them for a completely different purpose.

There is no technical need at all for the same password to gate both local device unlock and remote end-to-end encryption key escrow.

It's a pure security vs. availability (and realistically genius bar support load) tradeoff, and I even think they nailed it for the vast majority of users! I just wish they'd let advanced users participate in that tradeoff more actively.

I just really wish they'd made PIN-based HSM escrow the default, but optional (with the "off" switch behind several scary-sounding warnings).

They already communicate to you when you use a newer iOS feature that won't work on your other device. But you can still use it. Maybe you won't be able to turn back on those features on the older device, or something

Thanks for pointing that out!

Honestly might not be a bad idea to have a backup somewhere else just in case. Like in the event of a fire or something have a backup sitting in a safe.

It does bring up an interesting conversation, what levels do we go to make sure we can recover accounts in situations like this? Store a USB or a paper in a safety deposit box on the other side of the country? I tend to store all of my backups for my other accounts on my iCloud Drive so... loosing access to that would be catastrophic.

That's transit encryption. The point of E2EE is to prevent anyone, including the service provider from decrypting the communication. Apple making a backup copy of the comms that they can read breaks the E2EE.

This argument makes no sense for two reasons. First, iMessage and iCloud Backup are not simply apps that you can replace with other services as you choose. "For your own protection" against malware or whatever, Apple restrictions prohibit anyone from offering an SMS-integrated messaging app or a cloud backup app in competition with iMessage or iCloud Backup. iMessage and iCloud Backup are not separate; they are part and parcel of the larger piece of software called iOS. Apple can't play dumb and blame users for making insecure choices when Apple is the one limiting them to insecure options.

Second, even if they were separate apps and replaceable, they are made by the same company. The service provider the end-to-end encryption is supposed to protect against is the same one making the non-E2EE backup. If Facebook started making a phone backup app that was "separate" from WhatsApp but made non-E2EE backups of WhatsApp messages to Facebook servers, and it was used by a large fraction of WhatsApp users, and the FBI was sending subpoenas for WhatsApp messages to Facebook and routinely getting decrypted messages back, would you really be defending Facebook for marketing WhatsApp as end-to-end encrypted? If so, I guarantee you would be in an extreme minority.

Apple never said that it was scrapped. They did, however say that they intend to do it.

EDIT:

Follow the links from those articles. Apple never killed the plan! This is what Apple actually said:

> Based on feedback from customers, advocacy groups, researchers and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features.

That's not killed. That's just delayed. It's also them reiterating their intention to ship these misfeatures. It was, as pointed out, widely misreported.

Apple is very good at writing technically truthful things that say one thing that cause reporters to report a different thing (which is not factual). This becomes an "everybody knows" sort of thing where the narrative that is widely believed/accepted is not what Apple actually said. They exploit poor reading comprehension ability.

No one wanted that, regardless of how the implementation worked.

Maybe I am just misremembering since like you I figured that was the reason they were doing it, no other reason to do something like that if it was all going too sit there unencrypted.

*The definition of terrorism depends on your jurisdiction.

> [Apple] will now allow users to log in to their Apple accounts with hardware-based security keys made by other companies such as Yubico.

iCloud off -> no local CSAM scan.

Local CSAM scan with multiple failsafes (+ actual person checking) + E2EE iCloud -> zero need to allow law enforcement access to iCloud servers. This would also mean that Apple cloud've encrypted them in such a way that even they can't access them.

"When receiving this type of content, the photo will be blurred and the child will be warned, presented with helpful resources, and reassured it is okay if they do not want to view this photo. Similar protections are available if a child attempts to send photos that contain nudity. In both cases, children are given the option to message someone they trust for help if they choose.

Messages analyzes image attachments and determines if a photo contains nudity, while maintaining the end-to-end encryption of the messages. The feature is designed so that no indication of the detection of nudity ever leaves the device. Apple does not get access to the messages, and no notifications are sent to the parent or anyone else."

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/

Just let me use my local Time Machine backup server!

Sadly, I am convinced I'll never see that feature – it would basically remove the need for any iCloud subscription for me and thereby undermine Apple's "service" efforts too much.