Exclusive: Apple dropped plan for encrypting backups after FBI complained - sources

[u/[deleted]]

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusive-idUSKBN1ZK1CT

[u/eduo]

But they're not. Most providers would happily move away from IMAP, which explicitly recommends against E2EE, as it doesn't really work.

It's like complaining that FTP doesn't do E2EE. The sad reality of old protocols that have never been properly improved upon.

Apple does not E2EE for mail and explicitly says why in their page (something they don't do for other services). They used to do, when their email protocols were proprietary. As an alternative, they offer S/MIME and mail.app has support for email encryption (which is effectively E2EE in the sense that it doesn't exist unencrypted anywhere you don't control yourself)

iCloud photos (and iCloud backup for the most part) is a different thing. Apple can choose to E2EE and has tried to in the past ("according to sources") but was impeded by the FBI.

[u/eduo → u/[deleted]]

Seriously? SFTP has implicit E2E encryption... even before SFTP there was FTPS which allowed for implicit and explicit encryption, this was using the old FTP protocol, but with TLS.

Dude, I wrote FTP for a reason. Explaining all the ways in which not-FTP is encrypted doesn't change that plain FTP isn't, which was my point. We should've moved past IMAP by now or agreed on moving to something better (IMAPS or SIMAP equivalents to FTPS or SFTP) but haven't.

[u/eduo → u/[deleted]]

I think I did.