this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2023
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This is one thing Apple has been pretty firm on. You can’t have a secure product and have backdoors. You can try to hide them all you want, but a backdoor will always be a massive security vulnerability.
I was assuming Apple was posturing until they'd actually have to do something.
They could well have postured in China as well, before backtracking. I have no Idea if that happened, but it seems reasonable from a PR vs Legal vs business development standpoint.
These are totally separate things. Apple users in China can still use iMessage and FaceTime and those are still end-to-end encrypted. If you choose to store your iMessages in iCloud, those can be accessed by the government, but that's the same as they can in every other country. The UK's proposal is to directly break the security of iMessage itself, something worse than what China has done.
No they didn't. iMessage can only be decrypted by keys stored in the secure enclave on your device.
There are some things that the Chinese government can access. The contents of messages isn't one of them.
And as for Facetime... those calls aren't recorded at all. Not sure how a legal order is supposed to allow access to data that doesn't even exist.
I agree that's not how it works in most places but I don't assume to know the inner working of a Chinese iphone or the version of iOS it's running. If there is a financial incentive apple will bend for China while also saying it didn't.
The way Facetime works is extensively documented and thoroughly audited by third parties - many of whom publish their findings.
If China had a back door into Facetime, I suspect I'd know about it as someone who follows these things pretty closely.
Right but none of it is open source so being extensively documented doesn't mean much and what I said still stands. You are assuming that what apple has told you is the truth with zero 3rd party audits of the underlying code.
Will, except in China. They opened the backdoor nice and wide for Winnie the Pooh so he could gobble up all the Chinese iCloud data