Comment on Apple ordered to open encrypted user accounts globally to UK spying

• Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  It’s important to note here that even if you turn on this option, apples 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

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  • towerful@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    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.

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    • Pika@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      You are correct, my issue 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.

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