4 ms·

What the... I was under the impression that iCloud backups are end-to-end encrypted. This is a HUGE problem.

by metafunctor 7y ago

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
parasubvert 7y ago
iPhone/iPad backups stored locally on iTunes (or Finder, in Catalina) are end-to-end encrypted. iCloud backups always were encrypted based on a key derived from your iCloud account credentials, since the beginning...
- mkagenius 7y ago
  Do they happen re-encrypt if I change my credentials a bunch of times or do they use my first ever password which was 123456?
  - lstamour 7y ago
    The point of key derivation is that it can use a key to encrypt that is in turn protected by another key/password. So the amount necessary to re-encrypt when your password changes is just the encryption applied to the key. A similar technique is used in local disk encryption, where you don’t need to spend hours re-encrypting your hard drive just because you’ve changed your local account password...
    - mkagenius 7y ago
      Then it must need my password to decrypt the key which was used to encrypt the raw data? What if I do not tell them my password, (assuming my password is one way hashed and stored) would that brick the key and in turn brick the data? Clearly I am missing something here.. Edit: or since it is "derived" and not really password which is used for encryption -- the derived thing could well be the hashed password. We are doomed. They might as well serial number their user and use that as key then. Never mind.
      - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
        You’re overthinking it. Create a private key. Protect that key with a pass phrase. If you change your password, you’re really changing the pass phrase. Does that clear it up at all? FYI these concepts are originated from military crypto. The foundations are solid. Implementation... well you know how that always is.... one CVE away from perfect!!
  - morpheuskafka 7y ago
    The local backups are encrypted with a key separate from your iPhone passcode. You can change it in iTunes, not sure if it re-encrypts or not. But of course, we are talking about local backups so if you have full-disk encryption or back them up to an encrypted virtual drive, you don't even need whatever encryption comes with them.
- mhb 7y ago
  For local backup, iMazing is great. It also does other useful things. It costs money though and you can decide whether that's a feature or bug. https://imazing.com/ https://imazing.com/
  - inapis 7y ago
    Does imazing restore a phone as it is? First party backups from Apple (iCloud/iTunes) restore a perfect replica of the phone, including app icon locations, arrangement, notifications, offloaded storage etc. I'm honestly skeptical that anyone else would be able to pull that off.
    - fulldecent2 7y ago
      Who cares about this? Yes, Apple has private APIs that it uses for its monopoly abuse benefit. That is why Apple's "Music" app can't be deleted from your computer ("'Music.app' can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by macOS.") but Spotify can be deleted. The solution is for Spotify to sue them on this specific issue and for other people to sue them similarly.
  - fulldecent2 7y ago
    Was this previously called iFunBox or something else?
    - mhb 7y ago
      Wikipedia says Created by DigiDNA, the software was initially released in 2008 as DiskAid, enabling users to transfer data and files from the iPhone or iPod Touch to Mac or Windows computers. DiskAid was renamed iMazing in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMazing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMazing
- miles 7y ago
  > iPhone/iPad backups stored locally on iTunes (or Finder, in Catalina) are end-to-end encrypted. Optionally encrypted: https://support.apple.com/sl-si/HT205220 https://support.apple.com/sl-si/HT205220
  - xvector 7y ago
    I suppose even if you don't check the box to encrypt, you're still protected by FileVault.
    - miles 7y ago
      > I suppose even if you don't check the box to encrypt, you're still protected by FileVault. FileVault too is optional: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204837 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204837
      - madeofpalk 7y ago
        File Vault I think is enabled by default now on new Macs? Or at least, its in the initial setup wizard with a "dark pattern" to encourage enabling it?
5ersi 7y ago
Why would you think it was end-to-end encrypted? Did you never use icloud.com where you can simply access all your icloud data with a usernam+password?
- EGreg 7y ago
  Well, you just have to “trust” the server to not serve a website that will phone home your password. Apple pinky swears they won’t do that, and all your browser extensions running all the time do, too. As Mark Zuckerberg once opined: “They ‘trust’ me. Those dumbfucks.” https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zu... And it’s not just mere words, here is he actually set up a honeypot site to get people’s passwords and break into their emails to satisfy his burning curiosity when he first launched Facebook: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the-harvard-crimson-2010-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i... Instead, he decided to access the email accounts of Crimson editors and review their emails. How did he do this? Here's how Mark described his hack to a friend: Mark used his site, TheFacebook.com, to look up members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. Then he examined a log of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. If the cases in which they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts. He successfully accessed two of them. In other words, Mark appears to have used private login data from TheFacebook to hack into the separate email accounts of some TheFacebook users. In a world where we are sending our Alexa data to “the cloud” and the companies are admitting people are listening to it, in a world where Facebook secretly records everything it can, why would you assume your password isn’t being sent? To the downvoters... you may say that this was only when Mark Z was a young man and now Facebook the company is far more responsible. But then we have this from just a few months ago: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-app-recording-camera-iphone-ios-news-feed-bug-update-fix-workaround-a9200696.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne... I can understand trusting a browser or a software release that can be tested by many people, and was signed with a checksum. But a website and all your extensions on every website?? Those can ship new code at any time. (Am I wrong? Any counter-arguments?)
sneak 7y ago
They can’t be; users lose their devices, then forget their passwords and need to reset and restore. Also, all your photos and notes and email and other stuff in iCloud are available to Apple (and by extension the FBI et al) as well. Even Apple CSRs have a ton of access to the contents of a lot of iCloud services. The situation is a lot better if you have all recent devices and 2FA turned on, then it can use iCloud Keychain for some stuff which is trust-circle based. You can read more in Apple’s latest platform security doc released late last year.
rsync 7y ago
You should look into the 'borg' backup tool - it has become the de facto standard for remote backups because it does everything that rsync does (efficient, changes only backups) but also produces strongly encrypted remote backup sets that only you have a key to ... your cloud provider has no access to the data. The borg website is here: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ and a good description of how it works and why you should use it is here: https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/
- metafunctor 7y ago
  I already use Duplicacy for backing up family personal macs to the cloud (in addition to local Time Machine backups). For linux servers, borg is great, and me and my companies are happy users.
- cmcd 7y ago
  Are there any advantages of using borg over rclone?
  - rovr138 7y ago
    Yes. Rclone simply copies data. If you `sync` `~/Documents` to your remote it will keep an exact copy. This is a simple backup since you only have one version. Anything deleted, the next time it syncs, gets deleted. Borg is a backup tool. Versioning is at its core. It does that efficiently by deduplicating file (chunks really) even if they’re not in the same location. So with Borg, if you create a backup 1 of `~/Documents` today and a backup 2 tomorrow of `~/Documents` you can see both backups and work with each snapshot. The size it takes should be close to the amount of data changed in the whole source. If you move directories or files inside, rclone has to reupload them. Borg detects but doesn’t have to store it again. With rclone some remotes have versioning (Google Drive, Dropbox). This could help in this case, but it depends on the remote. With Borg this is built in and you can change the underlying storage and migrate without loosing any data. Using versioning with crypt would probably be a pain too due to the file names. Not sure if rclone has commands/flags to help with this that I simply don’t know about.
gowld 7y ago
It's huge problem that you believed something that was never suggested by Apple and never part of the threat model. Apple runs the closed source OS on your phone. You obviously can't hide information on your phone from Apple.
zionic 7y ago
Not only this, but your iMessage E2E is protected in flight by a key that gets stored in your backup. So anyone recording your iMessages can retroactively decrypt them if they get your backup.
mtgx 7y ago
Nope. I actually thought this was well known. What did suck on Apple's part was that they wouldn't allow you to disconnect the actually end-to-end encrypted iMessages from the iCloud backups for many years. So since most people kept their iCloud enabled, that meant their "iMessage end-to-end encryption" was nothing of the sort, as all messages had a copy that Apple could read on its servers. I actually don't know if this is still true since I haven't used an iPhone in some time, but I sure hope it isn't anymore.
dwnvoted2hell 7y ago
The way FBI runs things has been a huge problem ever since the drug trade came to the US.
djsumdog 7y ago
You ever read the reviews for the MEGA app? Everyone complains that there's no password reset feature. MEGA is fully encrypted so you literally can't reset your password. It says this when you first crate an account and get a recovery key. I don't think the general public would understand end-to-end encrypted backups. It would probably hurt their company if all backups were totally unrecoverable.
- sparker72678 7y ago
  > I don't think the general public would understand end-to-end encrypted backups. I imagine you're right; it would still be nice for individuals and organizations to have the _option_ though.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    You do have the option. Local device backup with a password. You can’t even turn off the backup password on an existing device for a new backup without knowing the old password (protecting against Evil Maid problem). I’ve had to reset a device when I forgot my local iPhone backup password to get it back to unencrypted backups.
    - sparker72678 7y ago
      You're right, of course. I had in mind an e2e encrypted backup on Apple's servers, which would be far more convenient than doing it locally. That's all.
      - zaroth 7y ago
        Well yeah, hence TFA; > More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee. > Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.
Silhouette 7y ago
This is a HUGE problem. Well, you can choose not to use iCloud for that reason (as some of us do). A bigger problem is that Apple deliberately locks up iDevices so it's hard to get your data off them using only local means, particularly if you don't also want to buy an Apple laptop just to do it.
- scarface74 7y ago
  If only iTunes existed for Windows....
  - Silhouette 7y ago
    If only iTunes worked reliably on Windows and didn't have a long track record of bugs, subtle usability issues causing catastrophic data loss, connection problems where it doesn't detect the device properly... Let me know when iPhones and iPads support standard plug and play protocols that work universally without relying on either Apple's proprietary and frequently broken software or someone else's commercial alternative that attempts to do what Apple should have been doing all along.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      So there is a standard plug and play protocol that supports everything that iTunes does? iTunes hasn’t worked well on any platform in over a decade.
      - Silhouette 7y ago
        Is there a specialised protocol for all types of data stored on iOS devices? Probably not. But plenty of other models of phone, tablet, camera and other data-processing devices manage to communicate just fine with Windows (or Linux or macOS) using generic protocols as USB mass storage devices, there is little excuse for iOS devices not to. In fact, you actually can download your photos and videos from an iPhone to a Windows PC by just plugging it in and doing the same as you would with your camera, but ironically this only works if you haven't installed iTunes.
luxuryballs 7y ago
Nope only local iCloud backups are encrypted, which is why I never backup to the cloud. But this makes me wonder if they have our local boxes totally owned already which is why the local encrypt feature would not hamper investigations?
bduerst 7y ago
End to End encryption doesn't work very well when the government nationalizes the servers with the end data and the keys to decrypt it. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in-china-is-now-handled-by-a-state-owned-mobile-operator/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...
- shpx 7y ago
  Surely in the context of "End to End backups" the user is the "End" on both ends. The servers shouldn't have the keys. They can be as compromised as they want, but the most they should be able to see is when, how much and where from you're backing up data, but not the actual data.
6nf 7y ago
So here's the thing... Apple is able to recover your backups even if you forget your password. Therefore they can decrypt it without your password.
koprulusector 7y ago
I don’t understand. Am I just tired or misreading? The table on this page clearly shows backups are encrypted in transit and at rest... https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303
- asgrdz 7y ago
  If it rains it gets wet outside. But if it's wet outside does not mean it's rained. This is an example of a recurring case where snakeoil and dishonest companies use this seemingly obvious logic puzzle, because people in general are bad at logic. To answer your question directly. TLS encryption from your phone to apple's servers means they terminate encryption at the other end when they receive your data. This means "they decrypt the information that was in transit". Then they explicitly apply another encryption to the received and decrypted data before storing it on disk. Since these are two separate steps, you have no protection what-so-ever since apple will have a registry of all decryption keys for the disk backups that they'll happily use for whatever reason when they want to get hold of your data. The only thing their disk encryption protects against is if someone were to walk away with the physical disks. It protects squat against the threats customers actually care about (unauthorized access to the data by someone other than the customer owning that data). And seeing as they run on AWS, physical security means that the only way metal leaves the data center is if it's in millimeter sized shredded metal grain. So the threat model of concern here is exactly what apple has decided not to provide customers any protection against.
- fulldecent2 7y ago
  "Encrypted" is a weasel word. There are many examples of "it's encrypted" even when encrypted refers to 8192-bit keys, where the system is not secure. Examples abound. So claims of "encryption" are meaningless. Instead, claims of "only X, Y and Z could access to this" are meaningful. "Could" is a strong word because it includes unforeseen circumstances such as writs and court orders.
metanoia 7y ago
On MacOS, iTunes/Finder stores (optionally) encrypted backups at ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup I was thinking of creating a symlink to Dropbox, for instance and having my cloud backup there. I don't know if the backups are incremental which could be a storage problem, but that can be managed through some scripting. Since we hold the key it's a blob nobody can get to without brute forcing it.

What the... I was under the impression that iCloud backups are end-to-end encrypted. This is a HUGE problem.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

parasubvert 7y ago

iPhone/iPad backups stored locally on iTunes (or Finder, in Catalina) are end-to-end encrypted. iCloud backups always were encrypted based on a key derived from your iCloud account credentials, since the beginning...

mkagenius 7y ago
Do they happen re-encrypt if I change my credentials a bunch of times or do they use my first ever password which was 123456?
- lstamour 7y ago
  The point of key derivation is that it can use a key to encrypt that is in turn protected by another key/password. So the amount necessary to re-encrypt when your password changes is just the encryption applied to the key. A similar technique is used in local disk encryption, where you don’t need to spend hours re-encrypting your hard drive just because you’ve changed your local account password...
  - mkagenius 7y ago
    Then it must need my password to decrypt the key which was used to encrypt the raw data? What if I do not tell them my password, (assuming my password is one way hashed and stored) would that brick the key and in turn brick the data? Clearly I am missing something here.. Edit: or since it is "derived" and not really password which is used for encryption -- the derived thing could well be the hashed password. We are doomed. They might as well serial number their user and use that as key then. Never mind.
    - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
      You’re overthinking it. Create a private key. Protect that key with a pass phrase. If you change your password, you’re really changing the pass phrase. Does that clear it up at all? FYI these concepts are originated from military crypto. The foundations are solid. Implementation... well you know how that always is.... one CVE away from perfect!!
- morpheuskafka 7y ago
  The local backups are encrypted with a key separate from your iPhone passcode. You can change it in iTunes, not sure if it re-encrypts or not. But of course, we are talking about local backups so if you have full-disk encryption or back them up to an encrypted virtual drive, you don't even need whatever encryption comes with them.
mhb 7y ago
For local backup, iMazing is great. It also does other useful things. It costs money though and you can decide whether that's a feature or bug. https://imazing.com/ https://imazing.com/
- inapis 7y ago
  Does imazing restore a phone as it is? First party backups from Apple (iCloud/iTunes) restore a perfect replica of the phone, including app icon locations, arrangement, notifications, offloaded storage etc. I'm honestly skeptical that anyone else would be able to pull that off.
  - fulldecent2 7y ago
    Who cares about this? Yes, Apple has private APIs that it uses for its monopoly abuse benefit. That is why Apple's "Music" app can't be deleted from your computer ("'Music.app' can’t be modified or deleted because it’s required by macOS.") but Spotify can be deleted. The solution is for Spotify to sue them on this specific issue and for other people to sue them similarly.
- fulldecent2 7y ago
  Was this previously called iFunBox or something else?
  - mhb 7y ago
    Wikipedia says Created by DigiDNA, the software was initially released in 2008 as DiskAid, enabling users to transfer data and files from the iPhone or iPod Touch to Mac or Windows computers. DiskAid was renamed iMazing in 2014. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMazing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMazing
miles 7y ago
> iPhone/iPad backups stored locally on iTunes (or Finder, in Catalina) are end-to-end encrypted. Optionally encrypted: https://support.apple.com/sl-si/HT205220 https://support.apple.com/sl-si/HT205220
- xvector 7y ago
  I suppose even if you don't check the box to encrypt, you're still protected by FileVault.
  - miles 7y ago
    > I suppose even if you don't check the box to encrypt, you're still protected by FileVault. FileVault too is optional: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204837 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204837
    - madeofpalk 7y ago
      File Vault I think is enabled by default now on new Macs? Or at least, its in the initial setup wizard with a "dark pattern" to encourage enabling it?

5ersi 7y ago

Why would you think it was end-to-end encrypted? Did you never use icloud.com where you can simply access all your icloud data with a usernam+password?

EGreg 7y ago
Well, you just have to “trust” the server to not serve a website that will phone home your password. Apple pinky swears they won’t do that, and all your browser extensions running all the time do, too. As Mark Zuckerberg once opined: “They ‘trust’ me. Those dumbfucks.” https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zuckerberg-ims-confirmed-by-zuckerberg-the-new-yorker-2010-9 https://www.businessinsider.com/embarrassing-and-damaging-zu... And it’s not just mere words, here is he actually set up a honeypot site to get people’s passwords and break into their emails to satisfy his burning curiosity when he first launched Facebook: https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-into-the-harvard-crimson-2010-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-hacked-i... Instead, he decided to access the email accounts of Crimson editors and review their emails. How did he do this? Here's how Mark described his hack to a friend: Mark used his site, TheFacebook.com, to look up members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson. Then he examined a log of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com. If the cases in which they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members' Harvard email accounts. He successfully accessed two of them. In other words, Mark appears to have used private login data from TheFacebook to hack into the separate email accounts of some TheFacebook users. In a world where we are sending our Alexa data to “the cloud” and the companies are admitting people are listening to it, in a world where Facebook secretly records everything it can, why would you assume your password isn’t being sent? To the downvoters... you may say that this was only when Mark Z was a young man and now Facebook the company is far more responsible. But then we have this from just a few months ago: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-app-recording-camera-iphone-ios-news-feed-bug-update-fix-workaround-a9200696.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne... I can understand trusting a browser or a software release that can be tested by many people, and was signed with a checksum. But a website and all your extensions on every website?? Those can ship new code at any time. (Am I wrong? Any counter-arguments?)

sneak 7y ago

They can’t be; users lose their devices, then forget their passwords and need to reset and restore. Also, all your photos and notes and email and other stuff in iCloud are available to Apple (and by extension the FBI et al) as well. Even Apple CSRs have a ton of access to the contents of a lot of iCloud services. The situation is a lot better if you have all recent devices and 2FA turned on, then it can use iCloud Keychain for some stuff which is trust-circle based. You can read more in Apple’s latest platform security doc released late last year.

rsync 7y ago

You should look into the 'borg' backup tool - it has become the de facto standard for remote backups because it does everything that rsync does (efficient, changes only backups) but also produces strongly encrypted remote backup sets that only you have a key to ... your cloud provider has no access to the data. The borg website is here: https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ and a good description of how it works and why you should use it is here: https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/ https://www.stavros.io/posts/holy-grail-backups/

metafunctor 7y ago
I already use Duplicacy for backing up family personal macs to the cloud (in addition to local Time Machine backups). For linux servers, borg is great, and me and my companies are happy users.
cmcd 7y ago
Are there any advantages of using borg over rclone?
- rovr138 7y ago
  Yes. Rclone simply copies data. If you `sync` `~/Documents` to your remote it will keep an exact copy. This is a simple backup since you only have one version. Anything deleted, the next time it syncs, gets deleted. Borg is a backup tool. Versioning is at its core. It does that efficiently by deduplicating file (chunks really) even if they’re not in the same location. So with Borg, if you create a backup 1 of `~/Documents` today and a backup 2 tomorrow of `~/Documents` you can see both backups and work with each snapshot. The size it takes should be close to the amount of data changed in the whole source. If you move directories or files inside, rclone has to reupload them. Borg detects but doesn’t have to store it again. With rclone some remotes have versioning (Google Drive, Dropbox). This could help in this case, but it depends on the remote. With Borg this is built in and you can change the underlying storage and migrate without loosing any data. Using versioning with crypt would probably be a pain too due to the file names. Not sure if rclone has commands/flags to help with this that I simply don’t know about.

gowld 7y ago

It's huge problem that you believed something that was never suggested by Apple and never part of the threat model. Apple runs the closed source OS on your phone. You obviously can't hide information on your phone from Apple.

zionic 7y ago

Not only this, but your iMessage E2E is protected in flight by a key that gets stored in your backup. So anyone recording your iMessages can retroactively decrypt them if they get your backup.

mtgx 7y ago

Nope. I actually thought this was well known. What did suck on Apple's part was that they wouldn't allow you to disconnect the actually end-to-end encrypted iMessages from the iCloud backups for many years. So since most people kept their iCloud enabled, that meant their "iMessage end-to-end encryption" was nothing of the sort, as all messages had a copy that Apple could read on its servers. I actually don't know if this is still true since I haven't used an iPhone in some time, but I sure hope it isn't anymore.

dwnvoted2hell 7y ago

The way FBI runs things has been a huge problem ever since the drug trade came to the US.

djsumdog 7y ago

You ever read the reviews for the MEGA app? Everyone complains that there's no password reset feature. MEGA is fully encrypted so you literally can't reset your password. It says this when you first crate an account and get a recovery key. I don't think the general public would understand end-to-end encrypted backups. It would probably hurt their company if all backups were totally unrecoverable.

sparker72678 7y ago
> I don't think the general public would understand end-to-end encrypted backups. I imagine you're right; it would still be nice for individuals and organizations to have the _option_ though.
- zaroth 7y ago
  You do have the option. Local device backup with a password. You can’t even turn off the backup password on an existing device for a new backup without knowing the old password (protecting against Evil Maid problem). I’ve had to reset a device when I forgot my local iPhone backup password to get it back to unencrypted backups.
  - sparker72678 7y ago
    You're right, of course. I had in mind an e2e encrypted backup on Apple's servers, which would be far more convenient than doing it locally. That's all.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      Well yeah, hence TFA; > More than two years ago, Apple told the FBI that it planned to offer users end-to-end encryption when storing their phone data on iCloud, according to one current and three former FBI officials and one current and one former Apple employee. > Under that plan, primarily designed to thwart hackers, Apple would no longer have a key to unlock the encrypted data, meaning it would not be able to turn material over to authorities in a readable form even under court order.

Silhouette 7y ago

This is a HUGE problem. Well, you can choose not to use iCloud for that reason (as some of us do). A bigger problem is that Apple deliberately locks up iDevices so it's hard to get your data off them using only local means, particularly if you don't also want to buy an Apple laptop just to do it.

scarface74 7y ago
If only iTunes existed for Windows....
- Silhouette 7y ago
  If only iTunes worked reliably on Windows and didn't have a long track record of bugs, subtle usability issues causing catastrophic data loss, connection problems where it doesn't detect the device properly... Let me know when iPhones and iPads support standard plug and play protocols that work universally without relying on either Apple's proprietary and frequently broken software or someone else's commercial alternative that attempts to do what Apple should have been doing all along.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    So there is a standard plug and play protocol that supports everything that iTunes does? iTunes hasn’t worked well on any platform in over a decade.
    - Silhouette 7y ago
      Is there a specialised protocol for all types of data stored on iOS devices? Probably not. But plenty of other models of phone, tablet, camera and other data-processing devices manage to communicate just fine with Windows (or Linux or macOS) using generic protocols as USB mass storage devices, there is little excuse for iOS devices not to. In fact, you actually can download your photos and videos from an iPhone to a Windows PC by just plugging it in and doing the same as you would with your camera, but ironically this only works if you haven't installed iTunes.

luxuryballs 7y ago

Nope only local iCloud backups are encrypted, which is why I never backup to the cloud. But this makes me wonder if they have our local boxes totally owned already which is why the local encrypt feature would not hamper investigations?

bduerst 7y ago

End to End encryption doesn't work very well when the government nationalizes the servers with the end data and the keys to decrypt it. https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in-china-is-now-handled-by-a-state-owned-mobile-operator/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/apples-icloud-user-data-in...

shpx 7y ago
Surely in the context of "End to End backups" the user is the "End" on both ends. The servers shouldn't have the keys. They can be as compromised as they want, but the most they should be able to see is when, how much and where from you're backing up data, but not the actual data.

6nf 7y ago

So here's the thing... Apple is able to recover your backups even if you forget your password. Therefore they can decrypt it without your password.

koprulusector 7y ago

I don’t understand. Am I just tired or misreading? The table on this page clearly shows backups are encrypted in transit and at rest... https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

asgrdz 7y ago
If it rains it gets wet outside. But if it's wet outside does not mean it's rained. This is an example of a recurring case where snakeoil and dishonest companies use this seemingly obvious logic puzzle, because people in general are bad at logic. To answer your question directly. TLS encryption from your phone to apple's servers means they terminate encryption at the other end when they receive your data. This means "they decrypt the information that was in transit". Then they explicitly apply another encryption to the received and decrypted data before storing it on disk. Since these are two separate steps, you have no protection what-so-ever since apple will have a registry of all decryption keys for the disk backups that they'll happily use for whatever reason when they want to get hold of your data. The only thing their disk encryption protects against is if someone were to walk away with the physical disks. It protects squat against the threats customers actually care about (unauthorized access to the data by someone other than the customer owning that data). And seeing as they run on AWS, physical security means that the only way metal leaves the data center is if it's in millimeter sized shredded metal grain. So the threat model of concern here is exactly what apple has decided not to provide customers any protection against.
fulldecent2 7y ago
"Encrypted" is a weasel word. There are many examples of "it's encrypted" even when encrypted refers to 8192-bit keys, where the system is not secure. Examples abound. So claims of "encryption" are meaningless. Instead, claims of "only X, Y and Z could access to this" are meaningful. "Could" is a strong word because it includes unforeseen circumstances such as writs and court orders.

metanoia 7y ago

On MacOS, iTunes/Finder stores (optionally) encrypted backups at ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup I was thinking of creating a symlink to Dropbox, for instance and having my cloud backup there. I don't know if the backups are incremental which could be a storage problem, but that can be managed through some scripting. Since we hold the key it's a blob nobody can get to without brute forcing it.