Apple pulls data protection tool after UK government security row

"a special key" afaik is where instead of using 2 large primes for a public key, it uses 1 large prime and the other is a factor of 2 biggish primes, where 1 of the biggish is known, knowing one of the factors lets you factor any public key with a not insignificant but still more compute than most people have access to.

UK has also invested in some serious compute that would appear dedicated to exactly this task.

basically if you dont have full control over the key generation mechansim and enc/dec mechansim it is relatively trivial for states to backdoor anything they want.

No, it's much broader than that. The UK is asking for a backdoor to your data and backups in the cloud, not on your device. Why bother with searching physical devices when they can just issue a secret subpoena to any account they want?

It's actually pretty amazing that Apple made ADP possible for the general public. This is the culmination of a major breakthrough in privacy architecture about ten years ago.

Traditionally you had to make a choice between end-to-end encryption and data recoverability. If you went with E2EE, it's only useful if you use a strong password, but if you forget it then Apple can't help you recover your account (no password reset possible). So that was totally unsuitable for precious memories like photos for the average user.

Apple's first attempt to make this feasible was a recovery key that you print out and stuff in a drawer somewhere. But you might lose this. The trusted contact feature is also not totally reliable either, because chances are it's your spouse and they might also lose their device at that same time as you (for example in a house fire).

So while recovery keys and trusted contacts help, the solution that really made the breakthrough for ADP was iCloud Keychain Backup. This thing is low-key so cool and kind of rips up the previous assumptions about E2EE.

iCloud Keychain Backup makes it possible to recover your data with a simple, weak 6 digit passcode that you are virtually guaranteed never to forget, yet you are also protected from brute force attacks on the server. It is specifically designed to work on "adversarial clouds" that are being actively attacked. This is... sort of not supposed to be possible in the traditional thinking. But they added something called hardware security modules to limit the number of guesses an attacker can make before it wipes your key.

And crucially it ensures you don't forget this passcode because it's your device passcode which the OS keeps in sync with the backup key. This is part of the reason your iPhone asks you to enter your passcode now and then even though your biometrics work just fine.

It is a true secret that only you know and can keep in your brain even when your house burns down and nobody (hopefully) can derive from something they can research about you. This didn't really exist for the general populace until smartphones came along. And that ultimately was the breakthrough that allowed for changing the conventional wisdom on E2EE.

iCloud Keychain Backup came out about a decade ago and it has taken this long to gradually test the feasibility of going 100% E2EE without significantly risking customer data loss. The UK is kind of panicking but when people see how well ADP protects their most personal data from breaches, I think they will demand it. It just wasn't practical before.

With the present state of politics—lack of both government and corporate ethics, deception, availability of much fake news, etc.—there's no guarantee that you could be certain of the accuracy of any information about this no matter what its source or apparent authenticity.

I'd thus suggest it'd be foolhardy to assume that total privacy is assured on any of these services.

BTW, I don't have need of these E2E services and don't use them, nor would I ever use them intentionally to send encrypted information. That said, occasionally, I'll send a PDF or such to say a relative containing some personal info and to minimize it being skimmed off by all-and-sundry—data brokers, etc. I'll encrypt it, but I always do so on the assumption that government can read it (that's if it's bothered to do so).

Only fools ought to think otherwise. Clearly, those in the know who actually require unbreakable encryption use other systems that are able to be better audited. If I were ever in their position, then I'd still be suspicious and only out of sheer necessity/desperation would I send an absolute minimum of information.

Apples revenue from china has been super dependent on new iPhone looking different, and has been steadily declining or flat for years, except for a few quarters when Huawei was sanctioned.

Chinese money was absolutely the forbidden temptress that continues to screw businesses. Luxury goods, cars, electronics, etc were all banking on china’s economic rise to grow their revenue, and post covid recovery saw all that money stay domestic.

China won’t oust Apple because twisting Tim Cook’s arm is way more useful. Same with Tesla and any other company that makes a big bet there. But they absolutely won’t be giving American companies an equal chance at success.

Given the carefully crafted way companies describe their encryption services, it seems more likely than not they have master keys of some sort.