Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late husband

Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by amaccuish on Monday August 20, 2018 @07:49PM (#17805294)

I hope they start encrypting them properly at some point, on device, key derived from Apple ID password etc.

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by dannyw on Monday August 20, 2018 @09:50PM (#17806174)

They can’t because it’s obvious they have a secret FISA order preventing them to. The recent iMessages in the Cloud shows this: messages are end to end encrypted in iCloud using a separate, unique key that is only stored on your devices... and this key is uploaded to your iCloud account if you have backup enabled. No choice.

This is after the original version, got pulled from the beta suddenly with no reason and no widely reported bugs.

The design of this irrational system only makes sense when a 3 letter agency saw it, and got FISA to compel Apple to key escrow.

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by macspoofing on Monday August 20, 2018 @10:23PM (#17806350)

You don't actually have any proof for anything you just wrote ... and you're making very specific assertions with full confidence.

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by nemothekid on Monday August 20, 2018 @10:45PM (#17806475)

>The design of this irrational system only makes sense when a 3 letter agency saw it, and got FISA to compel Apple to key escrow.

Or the more common reasoning: Apple wanted to provide a method for you to restore your new iPhone from an iCloud backup without treating your Apple ID password as an encryption key.

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by pvg on Monday August 20, 2018 @10:38PM (#17806443)

it’s obvious they have a secret FISA order preventing them to.

How is that obvious? And how a court do this? What would be the legal basis?

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by jplayer01 on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @02:22AM (#17807453)

National security. As it always is.

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by pvg on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @02:26AM (#17807470)

That doesn't really mean anything.

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by Osyris on Monday August 20, 2018 @09:24PM (#17805980)

Would that work? I'm not an iPhone user but I thought a big part of iCloud backups were for restoring a backup onto a new device.

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by eugeniub on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @09:11PM (#17815391)

I think they could pull it off in a way that would result in few inaccessible backups. The decryption keys could be stored on your iCloud Keychain, so if you lose one iOS device, the backup can be decrypted with another iOS device you own. And maybe the encryption key could itself be derived from your device's passcode in some asymmetric way.

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by pat2man on Monday August 20, 2018 @10:17PM (#17806316)

You can always backup using iTunes, which give you full encrypted backups.

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Re:Nelson woman delighted after Apple unlocks iPhone of late... by eugeniub on Tuesday August 21, 2018 @08:59PM (#17815312)

This will become an increasingly untenable solution in the future. Apple has been pushing iOS towards independence from PCs in the past couple of years, removing things such as installing apps through iTunes. Additional iOS and macOS updates could create new bugs in the iTunes/iOS sync process that Apple may not want to bother fixing anymore. They might remove iTunes backup entirely. And there are increasing numbers of iPhone users without Macs or PCs at all.

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