Is there something different about Apple's end-to-end encryption?

3 points by thinkloop 3 years ago | 1 comment

We have signal, Whatsapp, matrix, telegram, ssh, file sync, file backup, and a whole host of other services that have all been end-to-end encrypted for the laymen for years. But authorities seem especially "deeply concerned" with Apple's attempt [1].

Is there something different or special about Apple's strategy that makes it harder to hack, or is this a case of Apple news selling?

[1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/fbi-apple-new-encryption-deeply-concerning

phillipseamore 3 years ago |

What's special about is that it kind of fails the E2E test. Apple keeps a lot of metadata available to themselves, including but not limited to: filenames, checksums before encryption, file type (from e.g. magic bytes so that a PNG called stuff.txt won't fool them), creation, modification and access timestamps and access counters. It's also seems that files are encrypted using their own checksums as the key (so Apple can de-duplicate files).

So I'm not sure what LEO's are worried about, the metadata available to them from Apple is more than enough for most of their needs.