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Comment by scorxn | Hacker News Reader

Check out Firefox if you need a cross-platform browser that syncs passwords, etc. I use Windows, macOS, Linux, and iOS, and I've found Firefox to be my best option.

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I want the one that stores the passwords securely in my devices’ secure enclaves whenever possible.

I also prefer the native OS browser without extra reskinned chrome (not Chrome) wrapped around it.

Firefox can’t do that.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Firefox, but I trust Apple more. Also: Firefox can’t afford to say no to the FBI.

I'm pretty sure the Firefox data is E2E encrypted. As in "If you forget your password, your data is gone."

>I'm pretty sure the Firefox data is E2E encrypted. As in "If you forget your password, your data is gone."

The argument though is that it's not true E2E without the secure enclave. App data can be compromised in many ways. Apple goes to incredible lengths (including burning the root key which cannot be retrieved or reset from outside the enclave into the silicon during manufacturing with no way of them being able to tell what it is) to ensure a chain of trust from the point that anything physically enters the device.

True, but then they also added mandatory key escrow using server-side HSMs with no way to opt out – and these are by their nature much harder to audit than local secure enclaves.

In other words, with Firefox you trust the security of your device, whereas with Apple you trust the security of their entire ecosystem. In most cases, that's probably even a good thing, but I wouldn't exactly label one as strictly better than the other in all scenarios.

You can opt out.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212520

Although, I don't think that was accurate for iCloud Keychain anyway.

I don't think this actually opts you out of key escrow these days. It only replaces SMS-OTP with the recovery key, as far as I understand.

It's impossible to tell, though – Apple's platform security guide has been last updated in April 2022, which predates Advanced Data Protection. (Weirdly they do mention it in the document [1], though, so the date might also be incorrect and they might have added that information since I last looked a year ago.)

At least according to [2], it seems possible to gain access to the encrypted data using the iCloud account password and the passcode/login password of one other device on the iCloud account in any case.

[1] https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...

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

>At least according to [2], it seems possible to gain access to the encrypted data using the iCloud account password and the passcode/login password of one other device on the iCloud account in any case.

But iCloud access is forced to 2FA with one of your signed in devices, which requires the local password (pin, touch id, or face id, all of which never leave the enclave) to approve. There's really no way to get something covered by ADP short of physical device access + a stolen/coerced pin number.

you don't need to trust Firefox, it's open source software, and your user data is encrypted, they don't have anything to hand out.

In 50 years they really need to do a case study on what on earth Apple poured into the drinking water to provoke these kind of comparisons.

i blame the marketing. i dont want to talk about the historically unencrypted backups nulling so much of what people thought from the ads, it might awaken sneak

You need to trust (or verify yourself) that they're storing things securely at-rest on your own hardware. Which it seems like they aren't.

It’s my go to password manager as well but unfortunately they stopped updating it.

The password management was reincorporated into the Firefox app, and you can tell iOS to use Firefox as your password manager. See bottom of https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/end-of-support-firefox-...

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