UK government is trying to get into iCloud end-to-end encryption. (Again?)
Makes me think about email servers too. Most of my private information is in emails, and not only I use a service where the host machines access the email, so do almost everyone I email to/from.
In 2026 good old steganographic messages, like in North Corea
Set an iCloud recovery passcode. It removes the ability to recover your iCloud account by verifying that you’re the owner but it also removes the ability of Apple to be compelled to access it.
Op: read about pgp/gpg. Do it now. When you don’t understand something ask questions about it instead of giving up.
Email was never intended to be private. It was never designed with privacy in mind and your use of a client employing an encrypted connection to your mail server does not solve the problem because tens of thousands of mail servers use unencrypted connections.
No one needs your iCloud to read your email, they can just look at the plaintext mail coming to and from the server.
Op: read about pgp/gpg. Do it now. When you don’t understand something ask questions about it instead of giving up.
While that’s usable for files, they cannot use it for the app backups and conta ts and such that the system creates on iCloud
Yeah people affected by this would have to turn on adp (iCloud recovery key) and be vigilant about how precisely Apple chooses to remove that feature assuming the uk government doesn’t back down.
Worst case scenario you’d need to be doing local backups and have iCloud turned off.
Metadata is a bigger worry at that point though.
People don’t want to hear this but an iPhone, with the right settings, is the most secure phone outside of a pixel running GrapheneOS. This is something that Daniel Micay himself would say often.
Secure? Idk, maybe. But definitely not private.
And yet the other day I read an account of researching tracking for ads, and the iPhone used sent a request to Facebook even before anything was installed
A bit of a different thing, but still.
I’m thinking CalyxOS for my next phone.
Last I heard it’s the only phone with a dedicated encryption chip, so encryption of everything doesn’t burn your battery. Is this still true?
Crypto instructions have been standard in CPUs for decades now. I don’t know about mobile CPUs specifically, but the AES instructions have been around since 2008.
Yeah but phones have had a problem where using the main chip for encryption would basically use all the battery. For a while Apple was the only one who didn’t have this issue because they included dedicated chips to handle the encryption. So they were even able to jump in to the “whole phone encryption” by default. While android phones had to leave it as a checkbox in settings that would eat your battery.
I just don’t remember if google ever got around to addressing the issue.
This is not true. You may be thinking of the Secure Enclave, which Apple processors have had for a while and acts as a dedicated piece of silicon to protect encryption keys. But pixels have this too, idk about phones with Qualcomm or exynos SOCs but they likely have something similar. Either way it has no impact on battery life and all major smartphones have been capable of encryption for many years
I’ve always Android phones with encryption enabled, since about 2014, and I’ve never noticed any issue, nor had I heard about this before.
Thanks for the well-meaning advice.
The recovery password in iCloud to stop even Apple accessing it is exactly what the UK is trying to undermine. It protects you - for now.
I tried to start using pgp for email years ago, the problem is of course adoption by everyone you’re communicating with, be that personal, corporate or official. I got one friend to make a gpg key! And most email servers, as I understand, pass to each other with TLS, and the connection from your computer to your email service is encrypted. The problem is the emails at rest on both ends, including hosted by the email provider. Moving my email off Fastmail, whether to something like Protonmail or stored only on my computer, would remove one particular attack surface.
Here’s hoping Apple sticks to their guns and pulls adp instead of caving.
In case you didn’t see it a few weeks ago, 3.3 million servers are doing unencrypted transport.
The way email delivery is handled also means you’re not safe just because you aren’t talking to those servers.
Wow, thank you for this! But it looks like IMAP and POP, not server-to-server. And how would one of these severs compromise security if not one of the end points?
SMTP is only encrypted if the second server responds correctly to the first servers starttls.
The striptls type of attack, which prevents the servers from getting a valid starttls exchange, was in use over a decade ago by some telcom against its own customers.
Even if you know the person you’re emailing has a correctly configured client you can’t control a man in the middle attack between servers which has been in widespread use for years.
Then what’s the point of services like Proton and Tuta over Gmail?
Anonymity and not being google or one of the other big mail providers.
Email is not an easily selfhostable service either. Modern spam filtering systems require the maintainer to jump through a bunch of hoops intended to defeat their anonymity and establish a recourse in case of problems.
They’re not anonymous, contrary to common perception. They’re encrypted, but they know things like your IP address and which IP addresses you’re communicating with, even if they don’t know the content of your messages. Some of them explicitly state as much.
Depending on the local laws of the company or servers, they might be compelled to share whatever data they do have, which could be enough info to assist law enforcement in making an arrest, even if they can’t see the message itself.
If you want anonymous email use, you have to use a logless VPN at a minimum every time you access a third party encrypted email service. That way neither side of the email exchange can tie your IP address to you.
Of course, I only meant that unlike Gmail and such services like proton don’t actively impede your anonymity and build a profile on you as far as we know.
Proton does require you to have a dedicated phone number or email to sign up though, like that was my main thing that swayed me away from making a protonmail account was when I went to sign up I was met with a phone number requirement and I’m like “oh well this isn’t going to be helpful”
They claim it’s to prevent abuse of the service, and that it’s only the cryptographic hash which can be used to find out if the email has been used on an account before. But I dislike that it requires even going that info
ammendum: apparently this restriction may be based off of your region used and browser. I was able to finally successfully create an account using Chrome, but Firefox exclusively gave me email or phone number requirements
I think I got in before they started doing that.
Actually I don’t think they require that. I just set up a new proton account on a device with a fresh wipe from a vpn endpoint I never used before and they offered to record a phone number or recovery email but didn’t require it.
Can you tell me which endpoint/region that you used? Cuz I just tried using a VPN endpoint from Switzerland Sweden and Ukraine and all three of them brought up a requirement to have a verification email
edit: disregard apparently it was a browser issue, switched from Firefox to Chrome and reconnected to a Switzerland endpoint and it let me solve a captcha instead of using email verification system
Smaller attack surface and fewer leaks. If you specifically are targeted, the government will look for a warrant for the data in your account, rather than the one you sent to. Gmail also I think there’s a concern that text will leak via AI - I remember hearing this concern even when it was just that associations in search terms might build from private email content.
I don’t think gayhitler is entirely correct about reading all the plaintext emails. If I understand right, major (most?) email providers use TLS (encryption) between each other and and to your laptop. The difference is the email is available on their servers somewhere, if someone were to get access.
do we think the uk government is just full of morons? like i feel like being evil doesn’t justify this… a back door for the UK would quickly turn into a back door for literally anyone
Again?
it’s a never ending cat-and-mouse game
Forever.
I couldn’t remember if UK gov have been trying to get access into iCloud e2e before; I’m sure they’ve been getting to mandate access to other encryption previously.
Did they tried to ban Signal to ?
Not signal specifiaclly, but they said they would shutter operations in the uk if the online “safety” bill passed. @[email protected] has posted a lot about it.
Ha tanks ! That is what I was thinking
Only possible as iOS fails to include a libre software license text file. We do not control it, anti-libre software.
For people recommending Tuta or Proton.
If only one party uses those services one would have to trust Tuta/Proton to not save a copy of an incoming unencrypted mail. If a government wants access, they have to obey or shut down. Asking the unencrypted email provider from the other party is the obvious other way to access your data.
Only open source E2E for both parties is is trustworthy
