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The question is whether Apple will allow recovery if you lost all your devices. If they don't, I don't think it is that hard for Apple to extend their current

The question is whether Apple will allow recovery if you lost all your devices. If they don't, I don't think it is that hard for Apple to extend their current security model to iCloud. They currently rely on senders encrypting messages with each destination device's public key, so they can store the individually encrypted messages separately in iCloud. When a new device arrives, they could have an existing device perform re-encryption of the messages for it (after the user authorizes that the device should be added). Even without the new iCloud functionality, Apple has always been in control over the key exchange, which would allow a malicious employee / government to write code that could add a new authorized device/key silently and thus allow Apple to eavesdrop from that point on in future conversations.

scarlac 9y ago
> allow a malicious employee / government to write code (...) from that point on in future conversations This is exactly what Apple fought to protect "recently". Once a government entity forces backdoors on citizen, privacy goes out the window. Apple knows this and I think you can expect them to make a gigantic media mess if they were forced to. It would ruin their business world-wide.
dsacco 9y ago
My thinking is that Apple will try to gradually replace password-oriented access control with a mix of PKI and key redundancy. Based on the company's movements towards public-key based two-factor authentication, I think they can reasonably get away with phasing out password-based account recovery by relying on two methods: 1) The user has more than one trusted device authenticated to the iCloud account; account recovery can take place using the other trusted device and passwords are not required 2) The user only has one trusted device; the user has a primary public/private key pair that encrypts all data on the client, but in addition there are 9 backup keys which are generated on the client, never transferred to Apple and (hopefully) written down by the user In the second scenario, Apple bypasses the obstacle to full PKI-based access control by implementing authenticating key redundancy instead of authenticating device redundancy. User data can be end-to-end encrypted by each key, transferred to iCloud, and if the user loses access to the device they can recover their account data using one of the recovery keys.

scarlac 9y ago

> allow a malicious employee / government to write code (...) from that point on in future conversations This is exactly what Apple fought to protect "recently". Once a government entity forces backdoors on citizen, privacy goes out the window. Apple knows this and I think you can expect them to make a gigantic media mess if they were forced to. It would ruin their business world-wide.

dsacco 9y ago

My thinking is that Apple will try to gradually replace password-oriented access control with a mix of PKI and key redundancy. Based on the company's movements towards public-key based two-factor authentication, I think they can reasonably get away with phasing out password-based account recovery by relying on two methods: 1) The user has more than one trusted device authenticated to the iCloud account; account recovery can take place using the other trusted device and passwords are not required 2) The user only has one trusted device; the user has a primary public/private key pair that encrypts all data on the client, but in addition there are 9 backup keys which are generated on the client, never transferred to Apple and (hopefully) written down by the user In the second scenario, Apple bypasses the obstacle to full PKI-based access control by implementing authenticating key redundancy instead of authenticating device redundancy. User data can be end-to-end encrypted by each key, transferred to iCloud, and if the user loses access to the device they can recover their account data using one of the recovery keys.