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There is a huge opportunity here for Apple to do a proper chain of trust. “You want to talk to Adam, but you haven’t verified their keys yet. However your contacts Anna and Derek have confirmed Adam’s identity”
“You want to talk to Family Lawyer D. Ivorstein, but you haven’t verified their keys yet. However your contact Wife has confirmed D. Ivorstein’s identity”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have a cryptographic primitive and a robust system to protect it (secure hardware, biometric auth), if you can confirm digital identity in real life you can be reasonably assured Adam is reading. Chain of integrity.
Just like blockchain, meat space applications of digital chains of trust require too much benevolence. At the end of all the state of the art crypto is Grandma pushing a button.
There is a huge opportunity here for Apple to do a proper chain of trust. “You want to talk to Adam, but you haven’t verified their keys yet. However your contacts Anna and Derek have confirmed Adam’s identity”
I'm always confused by this. This merely validates that Anna at the time thought that was Adam's number, what else? Does not guarantee it's Adam reading.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a great argument IMO. If only 0.1% people check the keys, the attacker may be just okay with the 0.1% chance of being discovered – especially if there's no consequences for them.
Only for mass attacks. A targeted attack will encounter the risk of the attacker being exposed. Think journalists, politicians, public figures
In most of the world everyone knows that journalists and lawyers are being monitored.
There is a huge opportunity here for Apple to do a proper chain of trust. “You want to talk to Adam, but you haven’t verified their keys yet. However your contacts Anna and Derek have confirmed Adam’s identity”
This is such a privacy leak that I have a hard time thinking you're serious. “You want to talk to Family Lawyer D. Ivorstein, but you haven’t verified their keys yet. However your contact Wife has confirmed D. Ivorstein’s identity”
To use iMessage Contact Key Verification, you’ll need: iOS 17.2, watchOS 9.2 and macOS 14.2 on all devices where you’ve signed in to iMessage with your Apple ID
Unfortunately my work iMac isn’t on Sonoma, it’s on Monterey. I suppose I could log out on that machine, but still, a bit of a shame older versions aren’t supported.
Am I reading the requirements correctly? Does this mean that for all devices to work with CKV, then all OS’s need to be updated, or will it not do CKV on any devices if even one device is not supported?
This seems somewhat similar to Matrix's (and other apps') approach of comparing keys to verify identity (plus with I guess some extra hardware requirements and attestation). I'm interested to see what the uptake is among users, because even though Matrix has done a fair amount to smooth this process, verification is still a pretty large source of friction from what I can tell, and I'm not completely sure how it could…
My suspicion is that it'll be quite low for many years, for two reasons:
- It requires a recent iOS and macOS version on all of a user's devices. Still got an old iPad lying around somewhere that doesn't receive software updates anymore? No key verification for you. (In a similar way, Apple has been making older devices obsolete by preventing Notes sync in some previous iOS version. This is only an issue because all of these apps are not updateable outside of the core OS.)
- It requires users to be logged in to the same Apple ID for iCloud and iMessage.
The former will only change once these old devices completely die – I just don't think many users will value key verification enough.
Seems like Apple is tacitly acknowledging that sophisticated actors have successfully been man-in-the-middling iMessage users. I wonder if they have clear evidence of that since I haven’t seen any coverage on this.