411–420 of 694 posts
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> Switch to an OS where this requirement doesn't come into play I use BitLocker on my Windows box without uploading the keys. I don't even have it connected to a Microsoft account. This isn't a requirement.
except Microsoft probably as a master key
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The same is true for Apple laptops! Take a look in your Passwords app and you will see it automatically saves and syncs your laptop decryption key into the cloud. So all the state needs to get into your laptop is to get access from Apple to your iCloud account.
The iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted.[0] Apple can't decrypt it. That said, when setting up FileVault, you have the option to escrow your recovery key with Apple. If you enable that, Apple can get the recovery key. [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651
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> Any power users who prefer their own key management should follow the steps to enable Bitlocker without uploading keys to a connected Microsoft account. Once the feature exists, it's much easier to use it by accident. A finger slip, a bug in a Windows update, or even a cosmic ray flipping the "do not upload" bit in memory, could all lead to the key being accidentally uploaded. And it's a silent failure: the securit…
>even a cosmic ray flipping the "do not upload" bit in memory Stats on this very likely scenario?
FYI BitLocker is on by default in Windows 11. The defaults will also upload the BitLocker key to a Microsoft Account if available. This is why the FBI can compel Microsoft to provide the keys. It's possible, perhaps even likely, that the suspect didn't even know they had an encrypted laptop. Journalists love the "Microsoft gave " framing because it makes Microsoft sound like they're handing these out because they lik…
> If your company has data that the police want and they can get a warrant, you have no choice but to give it to them. Yes. The thing is: Microsoft made the design decision to copy the keys to the cloud, in plaintext. And they made this decision with the full knowledge that the cops could ask for the data. You can encrypt secrets end-to-end - just look at how password managers work - and it means the cops can only su…
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That only strengthens the parent point. Switch to an OS where this requirement doesn't come into play if you're worried about any governments having a backdoor into your own machine.
> Switch to an OS where this requirement doesn't come into play I use BitLocker on my Windows box without uploading the keys. I don't even have it connected to a Microsoft account. This isn't a requirement.
Probably not now but not something unimaginable in some future.
However, since Windows can still run on user-controlled hardware (non-secure boot or VMs), I guess this kind of behavior could be checked for by intercepting communications before TLS encryption.
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None of these really match the scenario we're discussing here. Some are typical big company stuff, some are technical edge cases, but none are "Apple lies about a fundamental security practice consistently and with malice"
> "Apple lies about a fundamental security practice consistently and with malice" Uploading passwords to the cloud should count. Also this: https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...
Are you expecting perfection here? Or are you just being argumentative?
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With Bitlocker it is still possible to have single password-based key. But enabling that requires to enter a few commands on the command line.
And you can be sure it didn’t add a ‘recovery’ key, how?
As for it being user hostile. I am pretty certain that thousands of users a year are delighted when something has gone wrong and they can recover their keys and data from the MS Cloud.
There should perhaps be a screen in a wizard, Do you want your data encrypted? y,n
If (yes) Do you want to be able to recover your data if something bad happens? (else it will be gone for ever, you can never ever access it again) y/n
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> Even linux could do that if they were compelled to. An open source project absolutely cannot do that without your consent if you build your client from the source. That's my point.
This is a wildly unrealistic viewpoint. This would assume that you somehow know the language of the client you’re building and have total knowledge over the entire codebase and can easily spot any sort of security issues or backdoors, assuming you’re using software that you yourself didn’t make (and even then). This also completely disregards the history of vulnerability incidents like XZ Utils, the infected NPM pack…
Threat model A: I want to be secure against a government agency in my country using the ordinary judicial process to order engineers employed in my country to make technical modifications to products I use in order to spy on me specifically. Predicated on the (untrue in my personal case) idea that my life will be endangered if the government obtains my data.
Threat model B: I want to be secure against all nation state actors in the world who might ever try to surreptitiously backdoor any open source project that has ever existed.
I'm talking about threat model A. You're describing threat model B, and I don't disagree with you that fighting that is more or less futile.
Many open source projects are controlled by people who do not live in the US and are not US citizens. Someone in the US is completely immune to threat model A when they use those open source projects and build them directly from the source.
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I don't think there's a good answer here. Users absolutely 100% will lose their password and recovery key and not understand that even if the bytes are on a desk physically next to you, they are gone. Gone baby gone. In university, I helped a friend set up encryption on a drive w/ his work after a pen drive with work on it was stolen. He insisted he would not lose the password. We went through the discussion of "this…
Some people will hurt themselves if given dangerous tools, but if you take all the dangerous items out of the tool shop, there won't be any tools left. Microsoft seems to feel constant pressure to dumb Windows down, but if you look at the reasons people state when switching to Linux, control is a frequent theme. People want the dangerous power tools.
Table saw blade guards and riving knives are an ironic example here: I've yet to hear a story of a woodworker that lost a finger on a table saw that wouldn't have been able to avoid that injury if they kept one of those safety devices on the saw. Everyone thinks the annoyance isn't worth it, since they are an 'expert', yet it happens frequently.