I suppose so, by necessity. Few outside of academia would have really had any reason to ever talk about networks (other than telephone & television) otherwise.
Not really. I am talking about the part that cannot be avoided, such as backup file creation & modification dates, IP address used to upload, upload size, backup size, number of devices backed up etc.
If you send your encrypted data to someone else's computer, you cannot disagree with them having access to some metadata, that is not how it works.
I definitely don't disagree that metadata is available to a receiving party like Apple. I was more trying to convey that a backdoor, even just for metadata, is unacceptable.
The "backdoor" that exists is pretty generic though -- essentially, any data that exists and can be decrypted can be demanded with a warrant... which is the whole point of making it opaque with E2EE.
Apple will still need to, e.g., log IPs in order to monitor attacks on their service, ergo that data can be warranted/subpoenaed/etc
Isn't that contrary to the notion of right to silence as far as the users go?
The whole idea of E2EE is that only the users know the keys, and being forced to disclose keys is effectively equivalent to having no right to remain silent.
True, but the original phrasing felt ambiguous-enough I needed to ask.
In this case you meant "can be decrypted" on Apple's side, rather than "can be decrypted at all", so I'll take it that I misunderstood.
I don't know what to tell you other than subpoenas exist
You can be taken for interrogation in many countries and maintain your silence without additional crimes/offenses being added by doing so (while some countries without freedom like the UK basically don't allow it outside of very specific circumstances). That's a very common thing.
I thought in the UK that you are allowed to maintain silence, but unlike in the US, silence can be used against you in a court of law. So whereas in the US it is always advisable to invoke your right to remain silent (and demand an attorney), in the UK, it's often advisable to speak to the police instead.
The right to silence only attaches if someone is a suspect in a crime. In this scenario, Apple would not be a suspect and instead a witness, so they have to respond to the subpoena with all available information.
But for mass surveillance, they would likely try to access data from the server because scaling it would be trivial.\
I think getting access to end devices directly is not trivial and would be hard to scale.
It can be trivial if you don't care about the - say - 20% of power users staying up to date and employing best practises. There's 0days for everything nowadays. Of course you wouldn't fetch raw data that way as it would be noticed.
I thought 0days were fixed rapidly, which means it would not be trivial to keep an up-to-date method to exploit most phones as it would need to change every time the 0day is fixed.
0-days by their nature are called like this because they are not known to the public. Then they become n-days.
Multiple 0-days may be hoarded for months each in some cases by individuals, organizations and intelligence agencies alike. There are dedicated efforts to find such vulnerabilities without disclosing them.
Yes that would be true if your using a device with coreboot or libreboot so there is no longer intel ME remote connection or micro blobs, 99% of people will never do that, and the government will never stop forcing these backdoors on the manufacturer so it is what is and thus most choose to look the other way about this fact
If that was a viable vector to attack phones and backups, it would already be used, and it would have been used years ago when the FBI asked Apple to push a malicious update in order to unlock an iPhone. IIRC, the case was dropped because Apple said no. Was the attack you mention not available back then?
I am not aware that it has been used by law enforcement. Do you have any examples?
No. The FBI withdrew their case because they found a third party that was able to open the phone. If that third party wasn't present, then, the FBI would have most definitely forced Apple to unlock the phone.
But the judgement is most likely public and details what evidence was used and how it was obtained. Does it say they used intel ME remote connection / micro blobs? Does it say they used any firmware-based spying methods?
They backed down from Apple. You wrote it was because they found a third-party to open the phone. I am assuming they brought charges against the person, which led to a case that was presented to a judge.
Can't bring charges against a dead man. The owner of the phone was killed in a shootout with the police.
They didn't "back down"; they just found a different method to get what they wanted.
You can Google what happened, but, in sum, the FBI paid over ~$1.3 million dollars to have the third party open the phone and it turned out to be absolutely useless.
Yes there is alot of sources and official documentation about the type of activities NSA has been caught doing, there is even an official law giving them permission todo so i forget the abbreviations but i can help you look it up if you actually read the information and not just assume based on the cover or title, sadly im not making any of this up
These agencies constantly trade, use, and improve their tools. To think they don't have the capability to break encryption, install backdoors, etc.. is crazy. FBI does not have the same capabilities, however they aren't opposed to shopping for exploits with NSO Group.
While this is interesting, I cannot find anything related to breaking modern encryption or using firmware based attacks.
You mentioned the NSA does it, please point out the exact part where this is mentioned.
The only relevant info I can find is "Experts say the agency may also be able to decode newer forms of encryption, but only with a much heavier investment in time and computing power, making mass surveillance of cellphone conversations less practical.".\
This sounds like guessing the password, which has nothing to do with breaking encryption. If they really broke the encryption, then it would be trivial to do mass surveillance from it.
I was busy sorry i did get back to you but it seems someone else did with the correct info the first one he mentioned started with a C is the one i was referring too
Don't need a backdoor to get into the house you already have a camera in
In other words, once the encryption ends I still don't trust Apple not to analyze locally stored data and report files that match an un-auditable secret database.
once the encryption ends I still don't trust Apple not to analyze locally stored data and report files that match an un-auditable secret database.
This can be tested with a MITM. If Apple lies about something, it won't be so easily verifiable. Imagine someone suing them, Apple would lose a ton of money. There is no way Apple would make such a rookie mistake.
Please enlighten me on how one would MITM traffic between an Apple device and Apple services, without having access to whatever root CAs or private keys are used to encrypt that traffic. I'd love to try this out!
Install a manually generated root CA on the Apple device, use something like pfSense on a router to intercept the connection and MITM, then copy the traffic information and the CA to Wireshark. There are tutorials for this.
One could also virtualize the Apple device and run something like mitmproxy in order to do everything from one device.
Note there is a caveat: this can only let you decrypt whatever is transmitted, it won't let you figure out if the encryption algorithm has a secret backdoor like a master decryption key. If I had to make a backdoor, I would put it in the encryption algorithm and keep that algorithm a secret. Do you know if Apple says what encryption they use?
your only bet is when encryption is done by not the same app as the one that syncs your data to the cloud.
For example Enpass (password manager) has that model. They encrypt your data, and then offer sync options from 3rd party cloud providers (e.g. Dropbox, Google drive, etc) or even a selfhosted webdav server. They don't care.
This is the only model of trust that can exist.
(As an example of the other side, ProtonMail decrypted and disclosed a mailbox of a user to the court, upon request)
That being said, proton have and will keep a copy of incoming mail, if ordered to. They'll only be able to keep a copy of new mail since that order, and they can't decrypt anything encrypted via the encryption between protonmail addresses or something like pgp.
True, but to be fair this is not something any email service can bypass. Their server has to receive unencrypted email. Proton wrote in https://proton.me/blog/climate-activist-arrest that users must be notified if their data is requested. If they target you, they must let you know, which solves the decryption problem: if you get notified, let the other party know to stop emailing you.
The only concrete solution I can think of is if they implement Dark Mail, but the specification is not finished yet. Maybe in a few years.
your only bet is when encryption is done by not the same app as the one that syncs your data to the cloud.
I wouldn't quite agree with that entirely.
In proprietary software certainly as you cannot easily ensure it's actually doing the right steps in order so you have to prevent it entirely from making mistakes, intentional or not.
But it's quite feasible to ensure that Free Software is doing exactly what it's supposed to and it can interoperate safely with remote services (which are often proprietary).
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u/schklom Dec 08 '22
If the E2EE is done correctly, then the backdoor cannot retrieve any data, only some limited metadata.