this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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UK government demanding access to encrypted iCloud (www.bbc.co.uk)
submitted 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) by milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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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.

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[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 31 points 17 hours ago (5 children)

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.

[–] refalo@programming.dev 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 2 points 4 hours ago

If the op has their information in emails and doesn’t want to move it somewhere else then pgp is a good way to at least secure those emails a little.

I don’t think it’s a panacea, but as methods of encrypting email go it’s widely supported enough that a person whose private information is stored in email will be able to figure something out.

[–] CleverOleg@hexbear.net 12 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 3 points 13 hours ago

Secure? Idk, maybe. But definitely not private.

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 3 points 15 hours ago

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.

[–] Nursery2787@lemmy.ml 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Nursery2787@lemmy.ml 1 points 12 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 1 points 8 hours ago

The other post covered how it was the Secure Enclave not just having a cryptographic piece of silicon, but what was for a while unique to Apple shit was the use of Secure Enclave for biometric data like fingerprints and whatnot.

[–] NewOldGuard@hexbear.net 2 points 10 hours ago

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

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 3 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org 1 points 11 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 hours ago

Disable iCloud backups, and do backup manually with iTunes plus the backup password set.

[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 1 points 10 hours ago

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.

[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 4 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

Then what’s the point of services like Proton and Tuta over Gmail?

[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 9 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Telorand@reddthat.com 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 4 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (2 children)

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

[–] refalo@programming.dev 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

But I dislike that it requires even going that info

I never understood this stance... do people really think a corporation is going to risk their entire company over your anonymity when their country's government does not allow this? Nobody is going to jail for you.

Plus, if everyone could easily sign up anonymously, then like they said, it would be overrun with bots and the reputation of their IPs would quickly deteriorate to where most other email providers would just block them, making the service almost worthless.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

It's a privacy activist stance, privacy and security are always at a constant battle. There was a post about it a few weeks back, every attempt at security compromises privacy, because private info is the easiest way to lock security down, so it's always the route that companies take. Personally I don't think a corporation should have to risk their company over it, but I don't think a company that isn't privacy oriented should pretend to be. It's misleading. I give them credit that they might be good for privacy but, the entire operation gets undermined when in order to sign up, it tries to force you into giving information that could identify you. The less information needed the better, and the less you can tell overreachers. If you don't have the information you don't have the information. That's signals motto, it's also Mullvads motto, and its the direction that proton runs in if you can find your way through it's hoops.

[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 4 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 3 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

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

[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 3 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Mullvad us Denver 205.

I’m also using their encrypted dns though that shouldn’t matter. Recording an email might be a regulatory requirement of the intelligence sharing treaties of the eu and broader eurozone.

Try an endpoint outside of the western world and see what happens!

[–] Pika@sh.itjust.works 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Yeah weirdly enough it ended up being a browser issue, Firefox wasn't able to use anything but email verification/phone number verification but Chrome was able to offer a captcha in place of it

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 2 points 15 hours ago

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.

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 4 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 1 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] Gayhitler@lemmy.ml 2 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] refalo@programming.dev 2 points 6 hours ago

And SMTP/IMAP do not support end-to-end encryption, so a malicious server can still spy on you even if it uses TLS.

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

In 2026 good old steganographic messages, like in North Corea

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 1 points 15 minutes ago

Whitespace steganography in markdown ;-)

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 14 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Again?

[–] Quill7513@slrpnk.net 10 points 18 hours ago

Forever.

[–] eldavi@lemmy.ml 5 points 16 hours ago

it's a never ending cat-and-mouse game

[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 5 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Did they tried to ban Signal to ?

[–] Irelephant@lemm.ee 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] TribblesBestFriend@startrek.website 3 points 14 hours ago

Ha tanks ! That is what I was thinking

[–] wart@hexbear.net 10 points 17 hours ago

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

[–] autonomoususer@lemmy.world 6 points 17 hours ago

Only possible as iOS fails to include a libre software license text file. We do not control it, anti-libre software.

[–] MeGustaBrainrot@feddit.org 3 points 16 hours ago

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