8 ms·

"On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and remind

"On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data" This is key. The way we engineer software and services can have a major impact on the war against overly invasive government requests. We know that these requests will come; it's our responsibility to design things in a way that protects customers from our legal obligations when confronted with them to the greatest extent possible. While this certainly serves their own interests, kudos to Apple for baking this type of consideration into the basic iOS design. They should and will be financially rewarded for it.

imaginenore 12y ago
All it takes is one secret court order to force them to leak the key to NSA. They control the OS, they DO have access to everything.
- downandout 12y ago
  Not if they designed it properly. That's like saying that all makers of encryption software can, if they really want to, access all data encrypted with their software.
  - imaginenore 12y ago
    Of course they can. All you have to do is leak passwords/private keys. An OS is actually much more powerful, it controls everything, it has direct access to memory. If a user can see his photo, the OS can.
    - BillinghamJ 12y ago
      > Not if they designed it properly. You can (and always should) design encryption code without having a single root key. Entirely open sourcing that code should not make any difference to the security of the encrypted data.
      - imaginenore 12y ago
        And then NSA forces Apple I to issue the OS update that breaks all your efforts.
        abritishguy 12y ago
        That sort of order is out of scope of anything a US court can order, and I believe that an Apple employee would leak it before they complied with such an order.
        mrottenkolber 12y ago
        How is that out of scope? Haven't they been doing exactly this for at least five years? Miscrosoft backdoors et al? And I think an Apple employee is that last person that would leak anything. They work for Apple after all, starting to work there surely takes some abandonment of principle. In the end, why would anybody feel assured by what someone believes someone else would do? Edit: Why is imaginenore downvoted so heavily? His concerns seem rather rudimentary.
        imaginenore 12y ago
        > That sort of order is out of scope of anything a US court can order How do you know that? Secret court orders are secret. "National security" trumps everything these days. LavaBit chose to shut down rather to insert a backdoor that was forced on them. I doubt Apple will shut down over that. And thanks to Snowden we know Apple's products have been backdoored already. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-ns... http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609310/hacking/apple--cisco--dell-unhappy-over-alleged-nsa-back-doors-in-their-gear.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609310/hacking/apple--cisc...
        abritishguy 12y ago
        But the laws that makes them legal are not secret.
    - Shivetya 12y ago
      not quite, on the platform I am on you cannot extract passwords at all, they simply are not stored. encryption at the hardware level may have a backdoor but os level is similar. lets be honest, if they want your data your the weakest link. if you want to be paranoid enough to go the route your thinking its far cheaper for them to take you to a back room and employ a hammer to you.
      - imaginenore 12y ago
        Doesn't matter if they are stored or not. If a user can access his files, so can the OS he is using.
rakoo 12y ago
Yet there's no way to be sure of that...
- ghshephard 12y ago
  No way to be sure - but, the profit motive is pretty good. Apple is going all in on Privacy as the basis for their $500B+ business model.
kristofferR 12y ago
The quote is extremely misleading. Sure, it's encrypted by your passcode, and that's great. It's important to note however that the passcode is just 4 digits long by default, and could be bruteforced by Apple in milliseconds if they wanted to. So to say that "Apple cannot bypass your passcode" is misleading, as guessing it is absurdly easy. http://www.slideshare.net/alexeytroshichev/icloud-keychain-38565363#47 http://www.slideshare.net/alexeytroshichev/icloud-keychain-3...
- downandout 12y ago
  Not the point. The point is that they've done enough to legally respond to government requests by saying "we don't have a way to access the data". Hacking customers' phones, regardless of how easy it might be, is far beyond the scope of anything that a US court can order a private party to do.
  - rlpb 12y ago
    > is far beyond the scope of anything that a US court can order a private party to do. They could order Apple to disclose signing keys so that the government can install spyware themselves. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_order http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_orde... for a case where they have done something similar before.
    - abritishguy 12y ago
      >the government can install spyware themselves It would have to be an OS update since applications don't have access to that stuff, even if signed with an apple key.
      - rsynnott 12y ago
        That's probably not quite true. Take an app that the user is already likely to have given access to their photos, like Facebook. Create a malicious app with the same app identifiers, sign, and push to the user. At that point, the phone thinks it's Facebook, and should allow access. That said, it'd be kind of unsubtle, and they'd probably get caught.
hrktb 12y ago
I am a bit surprised that there is no explicit declaration that they don't have user's passcode. It should be obvious, but I think it should also be stated in a way that makes it a lie if it's later discovered that left some way to access or keep the passcodes.
lazyjones 12y ago
What's keeping government agencies from putting keylogging code on the SIM card or baseband processor (whichever has the best access to host cpu/memory) via the carriers to obtain the passcode? Not much I guess. Has Apple publicly claimed that they will also refuse to push individualized compromising code updates to devices on demand by gov't authorities?
- abritishguy 12y ago
  >keylogging code on the SIM card or baseband processor That won't work. >Has Apple publicly claimed that they will also refuse to push individualized compromising code updates to devices on demand by gov't authorities? No, and even though I strongly doubt the government would even try to do this and even more strongly doubt Apple would comply, their new tech (apple pay and touch ID use hardware support to even protect against this sort of breach which shows that they are certainly thinking about it). I'm pretty sure Apple won't even have the ability to silently push an OS update (if they did then someone could find out because it would be in the OS and then all hell would break loose) - it would have to be accepted by the target which means there is a reasonably large chance of detection.
  - kabouseng 12y ago
    Not on the sim card, but on the base band processor it very probably will work, since the base band on many cell phone cores share the memory with the application processor.
    - abritishguy 12y ago
      Well it certainly doesn't work like that on an iPhone.
      - kabouseng 12y ago
        Please illuminate me then as to what the iPhones processor architecture looks like, seeing as iPhones also use Qualcomm basebands, same as most Android devices...
krisgenre 12y ago
Aren't all these data backed up to iCloud? Is it also protected with a passcode?
- rsynnott 12y ago
  This seems like the flaw in the argument, yeah. iCloud isn't mandatory, of course, but most people do use it, so peoples' photos and things will be in The Cloud, anyway. Possibly several The Clouds; Google+ on iOS keeps badgering me to enable automatic photo uploading.
  - krisgenre 12y ago
    Hmmm.. Isn't it way easier for the feds to peek into the cloud for my data without even me knowing so that I'll keep giving them the data then to confiscate my phone and investigate it? To me, it seems like this passcode thing is a good way to keep my data safe from thieves but from the govt.? don't think so.
    - rsynnott 12y ago
      Yes; if this is something you're worried about, you probably shouldn't use cloud services. It's not like they're mandatory.
    - subdane 12y ago
      This. In the coming years it will be increasingly convenient and perhaps mandatory to have your data on iCloud - if you want to backup, restore or find your devices. The latest iCloud upgrade allows for 1TB of data - it's easy to imagine having your entire laptop, phone, ipad up there in the near future. So physically preventing access to a single device is not nearly as important as protecting your entire digital life in the cloud. This announcement by Apple is a good sign, but it feels like the real battle for privacy from govt snooping will be in the cloud.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago
I am aware of once incidence of an Australian state police forensics unit being unable to circumvent a non-simple passcode lock on iOS 6.1.3 with physical access to the device (iPhone 4s), set to wipe all user data after 10 unsuccessful attempts. Seems secure to me.
pantaril 12y ago
>"On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data" Too bad they (and other phone manufacturers) don't protect phone calls with some kind of end-to-end encryption.
- roc 12y ago
  There's not much one company can do about the standards. [1] They can only control their own output. Apple asserts that Facetime and Facetime Audio are end-to-end encrypted. And Google claims Hangouts are encrypted as well. I don't know whether there are caveats (or how many) to either of those claims. But that's about as much as one could hope for in the current climate. [2] [1] Particularly upstart computer companies dealing with the telecom oligopoly. Long cozy with governments and law-enforcement, if not an explicit part of government. [2] It's a serious bummer that FaceTime never developed into the open standard they claimed at introduction. I've been curious about where that fell apart. (Competitor disinterest, patent liability, carrier terms, etc)
  - tlack 12y ago
    I heard a rumor that the FaceTime open spec never happened due to complicated patent issues, possibly related to this one: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114 All of this is a damn shame because in my experience the competing standards don't have the usability and quality that FaceTime provides.
Mikeb85 12y ago
Yet the page says "less than 0.00385% of customers had data disclosed due to government information requests." So they ARE giving data to the government at their request... BTW, that percentage of say, 100 million customers (which I'm sure Apple has, probably more) is 3850 people, not an insignificant number... Anyhow, I personally wouldn't trust anyone anyway. Google, MS and Apple are all American corporations, and need to comply with US law, no matter how asinine.
- paxswill 12y ago
  Their detailed report[0] is pretty clear, and defines what they mean for the categories they're reporting. According to that document, they had 20221 device data requests, and they provided data for 12146 of those requests (some of those requests have many individual devices). For account data, they received requests for data from 2803 accounts, and provided some data for 1333 accounts. 0: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/government-information-requests-20140630.pdf https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/government-information-re...
- rendezvouscp 12y ago
  Unless I’m doing the math wrong, 0.00385% of 10 million is 385.
  - Mikeb85 12y ago
    Yeah, my math was bad, too early in the morning (that was pre-coffee). Anyhow, they have way more than 10 million customers (likely more than 100 million too).
  - alwillis 12y ago
    Not to mention that Apple has sold over 800 million iOS devices.

imaginenore 12y ago

All it takes is one secret court order to force them to leak the key to NSA. They control the OS, they DO have access to everything.

downandout 12y ago
Not if they designed it properly. That's like saying that all makers of encryption software can, if they really want to, access all data encrypted with their software.
- imaginenore 12y ago
  Of course they can. All you have to do is leak passwords/private keys. An OS is actually much more powerful, it controls everything, it has direct access to memory. If a user can see his photo, the OS can.
  - BillinghamJ 12y ago
    > Not if they designed it properly. You can (and always should) design encryption code without having a single root key. Entirely open sourcing that code should not make any difference to the security of the encrypted data.
    - imaginenore 12y ago
      And then NSA forces Apple I to issue the OS update that breaks all your efforts.
      - abritishguy 12y ago
        That sort of order is out of scope of anything a US court can order, and I believe that an Apple employee would leak it before they complied with such an order.
        mrottenkolber 12y ago
        How is that out of scope? Haven't they been doing exactly this for at least five years? Miscrosoft backdoors et al? And I think an Apple employee is that last person that would leak anything. They work for Apple after all, starting to work there surely takes some abandonment of principle. In the end, why would anybody feel assured by what someone believes someone else would do? Edit: Why is imaginenore downvoted so heavily? His concerns seem rather rudimentary.
        imaginenore 12y ago
        > That sort of order is out of scope of anything a US court can order How do you know that? Secret court orders are secret. "National security" trumps everything these days. LavaBit chose to shut down rather to insert a backdoor that was forced on them. I doubt Apple will shut down over that. And thanks to Snowden we know Apple's products have been backdoored already. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-nsa-has-back-doors-for-numerous-devices-a-940994.html http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/catalog-reveals-ns... http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609310/hacking/apple--cisco--dell-unhappy-over-alleged-nsa-back-doors-in-their-gear.html http://www.infoworld.com/article/2609310/hacking/apple--cisc...
        abritishguy 12y ago
        But the laws that makes them legal are not secret.
  - Shivetya 12y ago
    not quite, on the platform I am on you cannot extract passwords at all, they simply are not stored. encryption at the hardware level may have a backdoor but os level is similar. lets be honest, if they want your data your the weakest link. if you want to be paranoid enough to go the route your thinking its far cheaper for them to take you to a back room and employ a hammer to you.
    - imaginenore 12y ago
      Doesn't matter if they are stored or not. If a user can access his files, so can the OS he is using.

rakoo 12y ago

Yet there's no way to be sure of that...

ghshephard 12y ago
No way to be sure - but, the profit motive is pretty good. Apple is going all in on Privacy as the basis for their $500B+ business model.

kristofferR 12y ago

The quote is extremely misleading. Sure, it's encrypted by your passcode, and that's great. It's important to note however that the passcode is just 4 digits long by default, and could be bruteforced by Apple in milliseconds if they wanted to. So to say that "Apple cannot bypass your passcode" is misleading, as guessing it is absurdly easy. http://www.slideshare.net/alexeytroshichev/icloud-keychain-38565363#47 http://www.slideshare.net/alexeytroshichev/icloud-keychain-3...

downandout 12y ago
Not the point. The point is that they've done enough to legally respond to government requests by saying "we don't have a way to access the data". Hacking customers' phones, regardless of how easy it might be, is far beyond the scope of anything that a US court can order a private party to do.
- rlpb 12y ago
  > is far beyond the scope of anything that a US court can order a private party to do. They could order Apple to disclose signing keys so that the government can install spyware themselves. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_order http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavabit#Suspension_and_gag_orde... for a case where they have done something similar before.
  - abritishguy 12y ago
    >the government can install spyware themselves It would have to be an OS update since applications don't have access to that stuff, even if signed with an apple key.
    - rsynnott 12y ago
      That's probably not quite true. Take an app that the user is already likely to have given access to their photos, like Facebook. Create a malicious app with the same app identifiers, sign, and push to the user. At that point, the phone thinks it's Facebook, and should allow access. That said, it'd be kind of unsubtle, and they'd probably get caught.

hrktb 12y ago

I am a bit surprised that there is no explicit declaration that they don't have user's passcode. It should be obvious, but I think it should also be stated in a way that makes it a lie if it's later discovered that left some way to access or keep the passcodes.

lazyjones 12y ago

What's keeping government agencies from putting keylogging code on the SIM card or baseband processor (whichever has the best access to host cpu/memory) via the carriers to obtain the passcode? Not much I guess. Has Apple publicly claimed that they will also refuse to push individualized compromising code updates to devices on demand by gov't authorities?

abritishguy 12y ago
>keylogging code on the SIM card or baseband processor That won't work. >Has Apple publicly claimed that they will also refuse to push individualized compromising code updates to devices on demand by gov't authorities? No, and even though I strongly doubt the government would even try to do this and even more strongly doubt Apple would comply, their new tech (apple pay and touch ID use hardware support to even protect against this sort of breach which shows that they are certainly thinking about it). I'm pretty sure Apple won't even have the ability to silently push an OS update (if they did then someone could find out because it would be in the OS and then all hell would break loose) - it would have to be accepted by the target which means there is a reasonably large chance of detection.
- kabouseng 12y ago
  Not on the sim card, but on the base band processor it very probably will work, since the base band on many cell phone cores share the memory with the application processor.
  - abritishguy 12y ago
    Well it certainly doesn't work like that on an iPhone.
    - kabouseng 12y ago
      Please illuminate me then as to what the iPhones processor architecture looks like, seeing as iPhones also use Qualcomm basebands, same as most Android devices...

krisgenre 12y ago

Aren't all these data backed up to iCloud? Is it also protected with a passcode?

rsynnott 12y ago
This seems like the flaw in the argument, yeah. iCloud isn't mandatory, of course, but most people do use it, so peoples' photos and things will be in The Cloud, anyway. Possibly several The Clouds; Google+ on iOS keeps badgering me to enable automatic photo uploading.
- krisgenre 12y ago
  Hmmm.. Isn't it way easier for the feds to peek into the cloud for my data without even me knowing so that I'll keep giving them the data then to confiscate my phone and investigate it? To me, it seems like this passcode thing is a good way to keep my data safe from thieves but from the govt.? don't think so.
  - rsynnott 12y ago
    Yes; if this is something you're worried about, you probably shouldn't use cloud services. It's not like they're mandatory.
  - subdane 12y ago
    This. In the coming years it will be increasingly convenient and perhaps mandatory to have your data on iCloud - if you want to backup, restore or find your devices. The latest iCloud upgrade allows for 1TB of data - it's easy to imagine having your entire laptop, phone, ipad up there in the near future. So physically preventing access to a single device is not nearly as important as protecting your entire digital life in the cloud. This announcement by Apple is a good sign, but it feels like the real battle for privacy from govt snooping will be in the cloud.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

TheSpiceIsLife 12y ago

I am aware of once incidence of an Australian state police forensics unit being unable to circumvent a non-simple passcode lock on iOS 6.1.3 with physical access to the device (iPhone 4s), set to wipe all user data after 10 unsuccessful attempts. Seems secure to me.

pantaril 12y ago

>"On devices running iOS 8, your personal data such as photos, messages (including attachments), email, contacts, call history, iTunes content, notes, and reminders is placed under the protection of your passcode. Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data" Too bad they (and other phone manufacturers) don't protect phone calls with some kind of end-to-end encryption.

roc 12y ago
There's not much one company can do about the standards. [1] They can only control their own output. Apple asserts that Facetime and Facetime Audio are end-to-end encrypted. And Google claims Hangouts are encrypted as well. I don't know whether there are caveats (or how many) to either of those claims. But that's about as much as one could hope for in the current climate. [2] [1] Particularly upstart computer companies dealing with the telecom oligopoly. Long cozy with governments and law-enforcement, if not an explicit part of government. [2] It's a serious bummer that FaceTime never developed into the open standard they claimed at introduction. I've been curious about where that fell apart. (Competitor disinterest, patent liability, carrier terms, etc)
- tlack 12y ago
  I heard a rumor that the FaceTime open spec never happened due to complicated patent issues, possibly related to this one: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114 http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20236114 All of this is a damn shame because in my experience the competing standards don't have the usability and quality that FaceTime provides.

Mikeb85 12y ago

Yet the page says "less than 0.00385% of customers had data disclosed due to government information requests." So they ARE giving data to the government at their request... BTW, that percentage of say, 100 million customers (which I'm sure Apple has, probably more) is 3850 people, not an insignificant number... Anyhow, I personally wouldn't trust anyone anyway. Google, MS and Apple are all American corporations, and need to comply with US law, no matter how asinine.

paxswill 12y ago
Their detailed report[0] is pretty clear, and defines what they mean for the categories they're reporting. According to that document, they had 20221 device data requests, and they provided data for 12146 of those requests (some of those requests have many individual devices). For account data, they received requests for data from 2803 accounts, and provided some data for 1333 accounts. 0: https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/government-information-requests-20140630.pdf https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/government-information-re...
rendezvouscp 12y ago
Unless I’m doing the math wrong, 0.00385% of 10 million is 385.
- Mikeb85 12y ago
  Yeah, my math was bad, too early in the morning (that was pre-coffee). Anyhow, they have way more than 10 million customers (likely more than 100 million too).
- alwillis 12y ago
  Not to mention that Apple has sold over 800 million iOS devices.