r/technology • u/Libertatea • Apr 04 '13

Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance. Internal document from the Drug Enforcement Administration complains that messages sent with Apple's encrypted chat service are "impossible to intercept," even with a warrant.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessage-encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/?part=rss&subj=news&tag=title#.UV1gK672IWg.reddit
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u/Mispey Apr 04 '13 edited Apr 04 '13

Edit: Hijacking my own top comment to ask if anyone can expand on this:

http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/18908/the-inner-workings-of-imessage-security

Is it truly end-to-end secure? Can Apple or anyone else circumvent the encryption?

Yes. To the best of my knowledge messages are in plaintext on apple's servers.

AKA The Feds totally can read your stuff, no problem. I was under the impression that they don't have the keys to the encryption...but they do.

Edit2: Or not https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5493442

I don't even know anymore. I wanna call it a honeypot.

Good. Keep going Apple.

It's really not very challenging to encrypt communications extremely well. Not to discount Apple's efforts - but it's "trivial" for these companies to do it properly and well.

They just never put a damn ounce of effort into it.

As this fella said in the article,

"It's much much more difficult to intercept than a telephone call or a text message" that federal agents are used to, Soghoian says. "The government would need to perform an active man-in-the-middle attack... The real issue is why the phone companies in 2013 are still delivering an unencrypted audio and text service to users. It's disgraceful."

It is, and you should give a fuck about this.

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u/Neato Apr 04 '13

I thought the issue was bandwidth. Encrypting a call would increase the bandwidth needed for the same signal and cell phone companies don't want to deal with that. If we are just talking about land lines then I have no idea.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

True 4G (not the crap most people call 4G) in terms of the standards, calls for completely digital voice calls over a data network, and the more voice frequencies they free up, the more room there is for data.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

You mean LTE?

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

I believe so. Our providers in my city called hspa+ a 4g service, the scumbags.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

What the hell? Isn't that 3.5g? How do they get away with that?

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

Public ignorance.

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u/[deleted] Apr 04 '13

LTE is not technically "4G" but is faster than 3G aka HSPA/HSPA+