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Comment by bigyabai | Hacker News Reader

> Apple’s 2016 stand wasn’t forgotten.

> It was buried under the next headline.

> But it’s still true.

Yeah right. Just in 2017 they started backdooring Chinese iCloud servers for the CCP: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/business/apple-china-data...

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I was thinking the same thing. What if making gold trophies isn't enough and DOJ wants a backdoor? The appearance of values can't be that important anymore because we are witnessing decisions by the company and CEO in his personal capacity.

Since 2022 they rolled out icloud end to end encryption meaning whoever runs the data center in china doesn't get to snoop if you switch it on.

Chinese iCloud servers do not have HSMs, which means that the encryption keys are all stored server-side, domestically, in plaintext.

Enabling data protection will not save you if, like in China, your government demands backdoored servers.

What do HSMs have to do with anything? Using HSMs doesn’t make it harder for a provider to decrypt your data, they can just ask the HSM they control to decrypt your data whenever they want.

HSMs exist to make it harder for outsiders to exfiltrate keys, not make it harder for insiders to decrypt stuff.

I can’t speak for China. But outside of China iCloud E2E uses keys that are only stored on customer devices. I.e. your iPhone is the HSM. In theory iCloud needs zero crypto capabilities server side, because all the crypto happens client side, and servers are just moving opaque encrypted blobs around.

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