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Comment by otterley | Hacker News Reader

> I think the Bitlocker "vuln" is a good reminder not to use vendor provided encryption for any sensitive data

I don't think that's true. Some vendors have a better track record than others. Nobody's popped the storage encryption on iOS or MacOS devices yet AFAIK; and the fact that it's tied to a hardware secure element makes it pretty strong.

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Microsoft quietly dropped support for encryption offload support ("OPAL") in SSD drives because the hardware vendors were doing absolute clown-shoes things like a single static hard-coded key or the key was literally empty / all zeroes!

There's levels of trust/security.

I generally trust Apple's device encryption, assume BitLocker can be popped by a well-equipped nation state attacker, and the rest I trust about as far as I can throw them.

PS: A related issue was (is?) that the comms between the CPU and the TPM chip on the motherboard isn't encrypted, signed, or in any significant way protected! Apparently it's relatively trivial to extract various keys including BitLocker encryption keys by simply clipping an oscilloscope to the TPM chip pins.

Reference: https://www.techcentral.ie/windows-bitlocker-no-longer-trust...

> Microsoft quietly dropped support for encryption offload support ("OPAL") in SSD drives because the hardware vendors were doing absolute clown-shoes things like a single static hard-coded key or the key was literally empty / all zeroes!

That's just the default OPAL key.

The idea was that you are supposed to SET the key... they made all paths go through the encryptor, so "unencrypted" was just a key with zeroes.

> OPAL

Ah, yes. Wave EMBASSY Suite, Wave Preboot, and all that other hot garbage.

Best part of Wave Systems was their horrid support organization. I loved being the tier 0 rep they contracted and trained with zero software knowledge and being a catch-and-throw for all the angry people that locked themselves out of their laptops. "Sorry, buddy, all I can do is make you a Dynamics CRM ticket."

You mean aside from the NSA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM

I don't see anything on the linked page that supports a conclusion that NSA has successfully broken the encryption at rest of an Apple device's storage since they introduced the secure element.

Care to share a quote?

Prism targeted network communication to my knowledge, hence the data wouldn't be siphoned from at rest encrypted devices. Instead it would've been leaked before it was copied to that local encrypted device, whenever it was transmitted over the wire. Eg when your background task uploaded it to iCloud or similar.

It’s worth remembering that since Snowden, much of iCloud is now end-to-end encrypted using keys that Apple cannot unwrap: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-icloud-keych...

Fwiw, that's a clear statement - but only that.

There is no way for us, the users, to know wherever they have the capability to add additional keys to decrypt the data because the platform isn't open source and doesn't have attestation wrt what's actually serving the requests.

And it's worth remembering that apple had similar articles published before prism too which were ultimately proven to be groundless by prism.

What, exactly, was proven to be groundless?

The whole thing relies on hardware security modules, so even if you can prove that the whole software stack is working as described, there is literally no way to know that the SE isn’t secretly handing the OS keys that a third party can decrypt.

There needs to be trust at some level, and trust in Apple the entity to not be outright lying about its thoroughly documented security posture is a reasonable level of trust for most people on the planet, including those who are at very real risk of targeted attack by state-level actors.

Ah yes, the bizarro world where systems are normally unhackable so the default assumption is impenetrable security and you need to prove they are insecure.

Thank god this is not the world where things get hacked all the time and where any claim of meaningful security is a extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary evidence and proof before credibly asserting it, but everybody just ignores that part and just pinky promises it and everybody just believes them for the 104th time without evidence.

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