Apple’s Mac security is so good, it’s sending used M1 MacBooks to the scrap heap

Re:Apple’s Mac security is so good, it’s sending used M1 Mac... by formerly_proven on Friday January 27, 2023 @09:31AM (#34546423)

iDevices are actually excellent at e-waste reduction precisely because of their "erase everything" feature, which gives owners a very quick and assured way to ensure the devices are actually wiped and reduces incentives to shredding devices or parts of them.

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Re:Apple’s Mac security is so good, it’s sending used M1 Mac... by hgsgm on Friday January 27, 2023 @09:35AM (#34546471)

The article is about the opposite, and how can you trust that the "erase everything" works? You can't verify it without destroying the device, since the storage is not removable.

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Re:Apple’s Mac security is so good, it’s sending used M1 Mac... by dijit on Friday January 27, 2023 @09:49AM (#34546636)

The article is saying that people don't unlock their devices before recycling them.

This could be true, but as I mentioned in another comment, as soon as it's removed from the original users iCloud account that lock will be removed.

> how can you trust that the "erase everything" works?

You can't remove it, but as long as nobody else can use the device to recover data then it's fine.

FWIW it's actually pretty easy with SATA SSD's to set a device key, which then encrypts everything on the drive at full speed: https://github.com/Drive-Trust-Alliance/sedutil

The drives are actually already doing this, it's just that the key is set to 0's.

I can imagine that, given the drive is accessed via T2, that Apples NANDS are being accessed the same way, in which case scrambling the key is enough to make it unrecoverable permanently.

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Re:Apple’s Mac security is so good, it’s sending used M1 Mac... by formerly_proven on Friday January 27, 2023 @12:06PM (#34548497)

fwiw self-encrypting drives always manage to end up in a research paper every ten years where they show the crypto is catastrophically broken, the key is "md5(serialno)" and the access check turns out to be if(!strcmp(pw,...) || !strcmp(pw, "letmein").

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Re:Apple’s Mac security is so good, it’s sending used M1 Mac... by danaris on Friday January 27, 2023 @03:36PM (#34551498)

"Some institutions ignore the fact that you can safely resell these devices and just bulk-recycle everything" is not a good counterargument to the GP.

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