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Comment by jamesy0ung | Hacker News Reader

Apple is nowhere near as evil as Microsoft, so I’m willing to put up with it.

Apple has been involved in all the same government spying programs as Microsoft. They do not offer any services or products with E2E encryption that they do not control the key too.

But at least they have E2E encryption. The whole point of which is not having the key to.

The whole point is that a 3rd party (Apple) doesn’t have the key. It’s not real E2E and it’s still susceptible to government overreach.

It is not. It is real E2E. Or at least, here is my evidence (and before you balk at a chatgpt link, the links to the sources are also in there). What do you have?

https://chatgpt.com/share/684dae83-a980-8004-8226-d6e13a673d...

Not every Apple service is E2E encrypted, but some of them (like iMessage) are, and it's 100% real E2E.

It's now way more than iMessage, especially if you opt into more:

https://chatgpt.com/share/684dae83-a980-8004-8226-d6e13a673d...

If you do a forgot password and move to a new device do you lose all your chats?

AFAIK, if you can't get a previous device to authenticate your new device, you will indeed lose your chat history. However, I have several devices that can always authenticate for new ones, so I can't verify this empirically.

As the other person stated, in theory yes, but in practice, if you are an "Apple ecosystem" participant, you usually have another Apple device available that you can auth on.

https://chatgpt.com/share/684dae83-a980-8004-8226-d6e13a673d...

Still need your password to use the key

No Apple can unlock your phone with the master key they used to generate your phone hardware enclave key. This is how the FBI has pressured them in the past to unlock devices.

Apple claims what you’re describing is impossible

https://support.apple.com/en-ge/guide/security/sec59b0b31ff/...

Which specific part of the enclave doc refutes it?

This Quora claims otherwise: https://www.quora.com/How-can-we-unlock-our-iPhones-if-we-fo...

The exact section is "Root Cryptographic Keys," here is the key passage:

``` A randomly generated UID is fused into the SoC at manufacturing time. Starting with A9 SoCs, the UID is generated by the Secure Enclave TRNG during manufacturing and written to the fuses using a software process that runs entirely in the Secure Enclave. This process protects the UID from being visible outside the device during manufacturing and therefore isn’t available for access or storage by Apple or any of its suppliers. ```

That may no longer be true.

https://chatgpt.com/share/684dae83-a980-8004-8226-d6e13a673d...

> They do not offer any services or products with E2E encryption that they do not control the key too.

Are you saying that Apple still has the keys when Advanced Data Protection is turned on? And has access to the covered data even though they say the keys are only on the trusted devices?

> They do not offer any services or products with E2E encryption that they do not control the key too.

That’s way off the mark from reality. You can look at Advanced Data Protection. It’s not enabled by default for the sake of convenience, but it’s an option available to the users.

Well if you're going to throw that out there, you might as well explain.

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