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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Disable iCloud backups, and do backup manually with iTunes plus the backup password set.
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.
Again?
Forever.
it’s a never ending cat-and-mouse game
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. @neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk has posted a lot about it.
Ha tanks ! That is what I was thinking
In 2026 good old steganographic messages, like in North Corea
Whitespace steganography in markdown ;-)
Also innocent cat photos, a piece of music or in a voice message, in all of these you can encrypt hidden messages.
“Jones, take a look at these cat photos.”
“Oh, they’re lovely, sir!”
“No, Jones, look at them. What do they mean?”
“Well, sir, this one is hungry, so it’s asking for food, but in its native American style. This one is looking at the camera funny, probably because it’s been startled by something off camera. This one is looking smug, and the angry people there have been added by the artist, they’re not from the same photo. This one–”
“Sit down, Jones. Look at their meaning. The terrorist attack will be at 2pm on the 23rd at South Kensington station, used as a distraction for the simultaneous heist in the Natural History Museum!”
LLO, but this isn’t the way how steganography works. In a photo any pixel has a hex value, a minimal change to another value of one or some bits can’t be seen by an human and so the change of several pixels to an predefined value can hide an message, beeing invisible by sight, but readable by an corresponding app.
I know, but I liked the idea of sending messages by interpreting meaning in a series of cat memes :-)
By the way, do you know if steganography in an image is truly undetectable? Or if an attacker could, by statistical analysis or pattern analysis, determine that steganography has been used?
It’s not so easy to detect a steganographic message in a photo, soundfile or video, it’s only detectable with specific apps. But the main reason is that goverments and security services first need a suspicion that these cute catphoto or an selfi of this guy in a beach is an secret message to make this analyse, much more likely to be suspicious of an encrypted message not feddable. This is surely more interesting to perform an in -depth analysis, instead of wasting time with thousands of vacations, selfies and kitten photos or analyzing the sound archive of your son playing Happy Birthday on his flute.
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
aaaaa you’re not me!
aaaaaare you sure!?
Yes! Yes I am sure! Aaaaaaa!
