Re:Apple’s Mistake
by heavyset_go on Monday August 09, 2021 @03:51PM
(#28121550)
> The files that iCloud Photos stores are encrypted to your account and Apple can't access them.
This is false[1]. Apple can decrypt them, and they can decrypt them and send them to law enforcement should they get subpoenas. They're encrypted at rest with keys that Apple has.
This article is about iCloud backups. It doesn't say either way whether or not iCloud Photos are encrypted.
Apple’s website clearly states what components are e2e encrypted. iCloud photos is not one of them:
I recall a court case where a police officer was convicted of possessing CSAM on his computer. The files were encrypted so the prosecution was not able to view them, but they were able to demonstrate that the encrypted files contained known images, I believe by encrypting a known image with the same public key and demonstrating that the result was binary identical. Obviously this wouldn't work except for unmodified files including cropping, scaling and editing metadata.
Re:Apple’s Mistake
by brokenmachine on Tuesday August 10, 2021 @01:42AM
(#28125480)
Interesting. Can you link to the case?
This way Apple can scan for CSAM without having to actually violate privacy by scanning a user's images themselves.