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Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

reuters.com

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Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#91

Post by dogma1138 »

abalone wrote: post #32
dogma1138 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren’t all the passwords backedup in iCloud as well as all your phone backups? It seems that China would just need to do a bit of work but they still can get every piece of data on the device.

Passwords are backed up but they are end to end encrypted. Check out Cloud Key Vault, it’s a pretty cool solution for keychain (password) backups designed for adversarial clouds. Unfortunately does not apply to regular iCloud backups or most other data. But a major step forward. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U&feature=youtu.be...

end to end encrypted doesn’t mean much when your decryption key is the Apple account/iCloud password.

AFAIK I never had to define an encryption password for an iCloud backup only for local backups with iTunes which means that the device only needs my Apple account credentials to retrieve and decrypt a backup from iCloud as such China and for that matter any entity which gains lawful or unlawful access to your Apple account gets to have the keys to the kingdom.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#92

Post by ryukafalz »

supergirl wrote: post #17
WillPostForFood wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are a Chinese activist, then yes, of course you are better off with the keys anywhere outside China.

what about American activists? why nobody worries about them?

I do worry about American activists, which is why I recommend that everyone use end-to-end encryption, especially if the data is stored within the US.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#94

Post by quickben »

ksec wrote: post #89
dis-sys wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple shipped 18% of phones worldwide, but when it comes to the Chinese market, it counts only 8%. You need a lots of explanations if you refuse to acknowledge the obvious here. https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3859963 Before start to waste your time, the 8% shipment in China figure was >14% just 24 months ago. https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/11/8584277/smartphone-shipme... To give you some extra details - I live…

That is why i wasn't very optimistic in iPhone X China figures. I dont see them around in China much as well. And the craze was no where near my expectation, and nothing compared to iPhone 6. But the sales figure was very different when announced. You are not the only one with this observation as well. Most of my friends and colleagues in different area of China had the same observation as well. I wonder why.

So where did they go? 8% is a lot.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#95

Post by abalone »

dogma1138 wrote: post #91
abalone wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passwords are backed up but they are end to end encrypted. Check out Cloud Key Vault, it’s a pretty cool solution for keychain (password) backups designed for adversarial clouds. Unfortunately does not apply to regular iCloud backups or most other data. But a major step forward. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U&feature=youtu.be...

end to end encrypted doesn’t mean much when your decryption key is the Apple account/iCloud password. AFAIK I never had to define an encryption password for an iCloud backup only for local backups with iTunes which means that the device only needs my Apple account credentials to retrieve and decrypt a backup from iCloud as such China and for that matter any entity which gains lawful or unlawful access to your Apple a…

You didn’t watch the video did you. That’s not how it works. The key is your device passcode.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#96

Post by seanmcdirmid »

quickben wrote: post #94
ksec wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is why i wasn't very optimistic in iPhone X China figures. I dont see them around in China much as well. And the craze was no where near my expectation, and nothing compared to iPhone 6. But the sales figure was very different when announced. You are not the only one with this observation as well. Most of my friends and colleagues in different area of China had the same observation as well. I wonder why.

So where did they go? 8% is a lot.

I think parent just doesn't hang around Xintiandi very much.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#97

Post by tonylinn80 »

cromwellian wrote: post #82
tonylinn80 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whichever way, it doesn't matter that much. At least where Apple wants to put their server makes no difference. It's not that we are "unaware" of anything, we just don't feel the same way about privacy (and many other western values as well). Not that they're bad, we just don't believe they're so important. Sure you think you "know the importance of privacy", but that's rather just an opinion, not a fact. In fact, an…

You'll feel different the first time the "social credit" system ends up denying you a loan because of something you said in a private message. Or you'd feel real different if you were a Uighur who lived in Xinjiang. Right now, thanks to a growing economy, no one cares about rocking the boat, or what the government does. That will all change when China experiences its first deep recession, and like the US, the governm…

The current credit systems in China works very, very differently from what the western media describes. Major commercial systems like "Zhemaxinyong" are actually way more transparent than US credit system. You get to see a lot of the details about what's impacting your score at all time, and you have lots of control on where do you want to share your score to.

The official "social credit" system that the government wants to build is still at a very early stage right now, and it'll be no where close to what the western media imagined (or rather, hoped)

The fairy tales about Chinese social credit system denying loans because of private messages are malicious wishes of western media or Chinese activists at most

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#98

Post by tonylinn80 »

Markoff wrote: post #76
rqs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd say most people already use local apps/services for almost everything, so having Apple moving servers to China won't practically have any impact on "privacy" or "human rights concerns" Does this mean anything? You also breathe polluted air like "most people", do you want new fresh air then? The reason of "__INSERT ACTION HERE__ won't practically have any impact on 'privacy' or 'human rights concerns'" is becaus…

you can't do IT business in China without sleeping with gov in one bed, so it doesn't really matter what people want, whatever you want company it's not allowed to provide only reason gov doesn't care about imessage is either because everybody use Wechat or they know already how to read your conversations even there

That's primarily an excuse foreign companies use to explain their failures in China. They want to run their business in exactly the same way the do in their own country, they expect the users to behave in the same way as their existing users. Then when they fail, they blame everything on the government. The Chinese government certainly have different values and believes from western society, so do the 1 billion Chinese people.

The truth is, Chinese government treats foreign companies much better than local ones. Foreign companies are much easier to get loans and tons of other resources. But it certainly defines rules that all players in the market needs to obey. Do Chinese people buy Apple products because Cook has been sleeping with Chinese gov? Did Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba all succeed because they followed instructions of Chinese gov?

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#99

Post by dogma1138 »

abalone wrote: post #95
dogma1138 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

end to end encrypted doesn’t mean much when your decryption key is the Apple account/iCloud password. AFAIK I never had to define an encryption password for an iCloud backup only for local backups with iTunes which means that the device only needs my Apple account credentials to retrieve and decrypt a backup from iCloud as such China and for that matter any entity which gains lawful or unlawful access to your Apple a…

You didn’t watch the video did you. That’s not how it works. The key is your device passcode.

The key for the backups can’t be the device passcode because the device passcode protects the key stored in the Secure Enclave on the device that is the local encryption key also 6 digits isn’t nearly enough entropy for any key derivation algorithm.

I can download a backup from iCloud and unpack it in any device or use a 3rd party application to view to content of the backup and the only thing I need is the Apple account password used for iCloud.

Re: Apple moves to store iCloud keys in China, raising human rights fears

#100

Post by thisacctforreal »

ballenf wrote: post #64
ztjio wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So don't use iCloud backups. You're never required to. You can trivially back up through iTunes, even automatically via Wi-Fi assuming you have them on the same network regularly. Anyone concerned about privacy, the first thing they should be ensuring is they are NOT using iCloud backup.

Given that Apple recently removed the ability to buy apps from iTunes, I think the writings's on the wall for the ability to locally backup iOS devices. Which is a huge shame. My guess is they're waiting for more complete coverage in terms of iCloud functionality and maybe security. But Apple has been known to pull the plug on "pro" functionality like this and/or remove functionality before the replacement was quite…

For many years it has been possible to backup iOS devices using the native protocols, thanks to libimobiledevice.

http://www.libimobiledevice.org

On macOS (I also use it on Linux, haven't tried on Windows):

    brew install libimobiledevice
    
    ## to disable iCloud backups
    idevicebackup2 cloud off
    ## if you want encrypted backups (native encryption)
    idevicebackup2 encryption on -i
    ## backup to a folder
    idevicebackup2 backup backup-folder
    
    ## restore from a backup
    idevicebackup2 restore backup-folder
This uses the same format as iTunes, which stores them in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup

There are more utilities included:

    idevice_id              idevicedebugserverproxy     idevicenotificationproxy
    idevicebackup           idevicediagnostics          idevicepair
    idevicebackup2          ideviceenterrecovery        ideviceprovision
    idevicecrashreport      ideviceimagemounter         idevicescreenshot
    idevicedate             ideviceinfo                 idevicesyslog
    idevicedebug            idevicename                 iproxy
You can also mount your iPhone's filesystem using ifuse (the only one in a separate package):

    brew cask install osxfuse
    brew install ifuse
    
    ## mount your iPhone
    ifuse mount-point
    ## unmount, or eject using Finder
    umount mount-point
Parts of these protocols have been around since the first iPhones, I find it highly unlikely Apple will remove these anytime soon.
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