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This may be annoying, but it’s uploading encrypted versions of passwords, not passwords themselves. Keychain is end-to-end encrypted so no one else can read the
by Veen 2y ago
This may be annoying, but it’s uploading encrypted versions of passwords, not passwords themselves. Keychain is end-to-end encrypted so no one else can read them.
- quyleanh 2y agoAre you sure Apple can’t read them too?
- Veen 2y agoThey say they can’t, but it’s impossible to be certain. Although, if you distrust Apple enough to think they might lie about it, you probably wouldn’t want to use any Apple device or services. They already have privileged access to the software and hardware.
- create-username 2y agoYes. SIP means Apple is the real sudo now. You can’t disable their special relationship on their computers
- realusername 2y ago> They already have privileged access to the software and hardware. The fact that the phone manufacturer has a more privileged access than the owner of the phone is absolute insanity.
- robertlagrant 2y agoThat's pretty normal, isn't it? Do you have more privileged access to your phone than its kernel does?
- realusername 2y agoI'd prefer it to work like a normal computer where there's a separation of the OS and the hardware. But sure, other phones aren't better.
- robertlagrant 2y agoI'm not sure I've used any operating system where I have more privilege than the kernel does.
- cassianoleal 2y agoYou can escalate your privilege if you can freely choose which kernel to run. Maybe you won’t have _more_ privilege than the kernel but you would certainly have as much.
- robertlagrant 2y agoI can escalate my privilege to be higher than the kernel's?
- lapcat 2y ago> Although, if you distrust Apple enough to think they might lie about it, you probably wouldn’t want to use any Apple device or services. It's not even about lies. It's about bugs and vulnerabilities, which every vendor has.
- privacyking 2y agoI'm considered switching to Mac from linux and I came across your blog which has been very informative. What made you chose mac over linux?
- lapcat 2y agoI didn't choose Mac over Linux. I chose Mac over Windows in the year 2002, and I became a Mac developer in 2006. Things were a lot different back then. Now it's too late for me, because my entire livelihood depends on Mac.
- privacyking 2y agoFair enough, I guess you are overall happy with the OS though
- mcsniff 2y agoNot throwing shade here on your decision, but that's still choosing Mac over Linux and every day you continue to make that choice. It's a perfectly fine decision, but Linux was, and still is, an option for plenty of people who develop for Apple hardware/software without daily driving it, myself included.
- lapcat 2y ago> Linux was, and still is, an option for plenty of people who develop for Apple hardware/software without daily driving it, myself included. Well, I believe in dogfooding. I don't think it would be good for my software or my customers if I didn't use the same operating system as them. Besides, work-related activities are mostly what I use a computer for, so I'm not sure what I would even do with Linux.
- blitzar 2y agoAre you sure AES 256-bit hasn't been broken?
- hello0904 2y agoBest practices for password storage use one-way hash functions (like bcrypt, Argon2, or PBKDF2) rather than encryption algorithms like AES. AES is not one way and in theory you can generate 2nd, 3rd, etc. master keys to decrypt. :)
- ethangk 2y agoThat’s relevant when storing a users password to verify that they’ve entered the correct data, but password managers (which Keychain effectively is, I believe) need to be able to retrieve the original password
- hello0904 2y agoFrankly, you're confusing hashing algorithms, encryption and "IDs". Authentication: "Prove you are you" (hash functions) Secure Storage: "Keep this secret but let me get it back later" (encryption) Identification: "Track who/what this is" (UUIDs/tokens)
- stouset 2y agoYou are deeply confused as to how password managers work. Password managers—all password managers—require stored passwords to be encrypted such that they can be decrypted. Otherwise they would have no possibly way to retrieve the stored secret for the sake of submitting it to the verifying party. Best practice for verifiers is to use a one-way memory-hard password hash. Keychain is a password manager.
- ziddoap 2y ago>Secure Storage: "Keep this secret but let me get it back later" (encryption) This is what keychain does. You retrieve the passwords later. So, no. It is not a one-way hash function as you stated.
- kevincox 2y agoEnd-to-end encrypted but Apple issues the keys when you log in and I don't think they offer any way to require explicit verification of new devices.
- mabedan 2y agoWhen importing the passwords into a new devices you’re required to enter the device password of whatever device created the password initially. Still no proof that there’s no back door, but as far as the system on the surface goes, it does make sense.
- kevincox 2y agoOh, I didn't notice that. I guess this is using their hosted HSMs to do the PIN check? Otherwise it would be trivial to brute force. But if they are using hosted then I think it can be considered a proper E2EE system.
- avazhi 2y agoIf they are uploading the PW and not the hash then… they are uploading the passwords themselves, encrypted or not. And guess who has the decryption keys…?
- threeseed 2y agoOf course. Apple has to decrypt the passwords when it pre-fills the browser. And the decryption keys are stored on your devices in the Secure Enclave. Apple doesn’t have the keys on their servers.
- avazhi 2y agoEither way the passwords are being uploaded, which is the comment I was replying to.
- Veen 2y agoThe ciphertext is not the plaintext (obviously). So an encrypted password is not a password. An encrypted password is a string resulting from the application of an encryption algorithm and a key to a password. Uploading that string is not uploading the password. The fact that Apple's software can access the keys stored on the device to decrypt the password after you securely authenticate is neither here nor there.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Klonoar 2y agoYour response implied something that is outright incorrect, which is what is at issue here.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- leephillips 2y agoHow do you know?
- misja111 2y agoWhy do you want to know?
- barrkel 2y agoIndeed, why would you want to know if the keys to your correspondence, bank accounts, investment logins, crypto fortune, backup OTP codes or whatever you might be using a password for, are sent in the clear to a third party.
- gruez 2y agohttps://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651 >Passwords and Keychain (6): End-to-end
- leephillips 2y agoI understand that Apple claims that this is the case. But given their history of incompetence in the past, that claim affords me little confidence that their closed source software does not contain critical bugs that might lead to recording or exposing the users’ plaintext passwords.
- acdha 2y ago“History of incompetence” really needs some citations, especially for the belief that open source tools are better - they had Gotofail but OpenSSL had Heartbleed, etc. One of the better questions to ask is not how the source code is managed but how it’s audited: there’s a long history of problems in both open and closed software but well audited codebases tend to have them patched before exploits are publicly available.
- leephillips 2y ago