this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025

181 points (96.4% liked)

Technology

62073 readers

4943 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

181

Apple ordered to open encrypted user accounts globally to UK spying (www.theverge.com)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by Picasso@thelemmy.club to c/technology@lemmy.world

17 comments fedilink hide all child comments

all 20 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 50 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Apple’s iCloud backups aren’t encrypted by default,

Why the fuck not?

[+] AcesFullOfKings@feddit.uk 53 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

[deleted]

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 13 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

It's important to note here that even if you turn on this option, Apple does not support full end-to-end encryption, there are still multiple factors that they keep under standard data protection which means they still have the encryption keys. They keep this under the guise of deduplication so they can save on storage costs but some examples of this are:

the apps+file formats you have installed
your phone's make model and serial number
most metadata that defines what an item represents such as date time modification time
all file checksums (this is scary imo)

They explain how everything with their encryption works here

[–] towerful@programming.dev 3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

My experience of checksums are in things like serial where they can potentially recover a corrupt bit.
I presume in the case of encryption, a checksum is more of a hash of the raw data? Like a one-way deterministic compute. Easy to get a hash of data, extremely difficult to get data from a hash.
In which case, it's fine. Passwords are hashed (granted, multiple times), but a cryptographically secure hash is not to be underestimated.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

You are correct, my concern with it isn't retrieving the data however, its the possibility that if the person involved had the means to, they could have a table of check-sums of files of interest. This system could be used to confirm or deny a file of interest is present on the device.

For the everyday person this is a non-issue, but from a privacy POV you should not be able to get any information in regards to what a file is.

Rainbow tables for password cracking works off a similar system, they take a bunch of commonly used passwords, hash them and compare them to leaked databases. If the hash matches an account you have the password. Most password handlers get around this by salting it, and hashing it repeatedly X amount of times, but I doubt that apple would do that for a checksum(and regardless they would know X and how it was made).

Again though I acknowledge that it's a paranoia level concern, but I still am firm that a true encryption solution should not be able to get any type of info out of it that may help the third party.

[–] Slax@sh.itjust.works 6 points 4 days ago

People aren't as technically intelligent as most of us on here.

Most companies haven't put up proper MFA with apps and rely on SMS. Imagine they used security codes to recover their data from Apple ...

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 15 points 4 days ago

They should just cut off all service to the UK and show a message with the contact information for everyone that wants the back door.

[–] BenDoubleU@lemmy.radio 21 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Is there an article/source for this, or is it just a pic of a phone with a lock on it?

[–] pls@lemmy.plaureano.nohost.me 15 points 4 days ago (1 children)

https://www.theverge.com/news/608145/apple-uk-icloud-encrypted-backups-spying-snoopers-charter

[–] L3s@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

@Picasso@thelemmy.club Could you post that in the body for us?

We're getting reports of this not being news/an article

[–] asudox@lemmy.asudox.dev 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

He's not the OP.

[–] L3s@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

Lol whoops

[–] Octagon9561@lemmy.ml 14 points 4 days ago

Encrypt everything. Show these fascist politicians and their laws the middle finger.

[–] Sunshine@lemmy.ca 8 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Matrix.org is in trouble as they’re hosted in the UK.

[–] SidewaysHighways@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

poop

[–] pls@lemmy.plaureano.nohost.me 6 points 4 days ago

British humour gets me every time 😂

https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/07/british-government-secretly-ordered-apple-to-create-a-worldwide-icloud-backdoor/

[–] reddig33@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago

This isn’t going to happen. I’m not sure what the UK is expecting here.

[–] trolololol@lemmy.world -1 points 3 days ago

I wonder if this was UK s idea or they're just acting as underlings of the great orange potato head and his husband space social man.