For a long time, if you used full disk encryption, the encryption key never left your machine. If you forgot your password, the data was gone - tough luck, should have made a backup. That's still how it works on Linux.
Pretty surprising they'd back up the disk encryption secrets to the cloud at all, IMHO, let alone that they'd back it up in plaintext.
That's why full disk encryption was always a no-go for approximately all computer users, and recommending it to someone not highly versed in technology was borderline malicious.
"Tough luck, should have made a backup" is higher responsibility than securing anything in meatspace, including your passport or government ID. In the real world, there is always a recovery path. Security aficionados pushing non-recoverable traps on people are plain disconnected from reality.
Microsoft has the right approach here with Bitlocker defaults. It's not merely about UX - it's about not setting up traps and footguns that could easily cause harm to people.
Google Authenticator used to be disconnected from reality like this. Users were asking how to copy the codes to another phone, and they said "you can't, WAI, should add the other phone as a second auth method on every site." Like how people say you shouldn't copy SSH privkeys. I figured out an undocumented way to do it on iPhone by taking an encrypted iTunes backup though.
Eventually they yielded on this, but their later updates had other usability traps. Because Google Auth was the household name for TOTP apps, this ruined TOTP's entire reputation.
I had hoped the average person would have a baseline understanding of how computers work by now. Baseline includes things like the difference between a web browser and a search engine, "the cloud" is someone else's computer, and encrypted means gone if you lose the password/key.
I am sad that this now appears unlikely. I suspect it may even be lower for people in their 20s today than a decade ago.
> Security aficionados pushing non-recoverable traps on people are plain disconnected from reality.
To be fair, if you inadvertently get locked out of your Google account "tough luck, should have used a different provider" and Gmail is a household name so ...
Less snarky, I think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with key escrow (either as a recovery avenue or otherwise) so long as it's opt in and the tradeoffs are made abundantly clear up front. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the route MS went.
Well, for a consumer notebook or mobile device, the threat model typically envisions a thief grabbing it from a coffeehouse or hotel room. So your key needs to be safeguarded from the opportunist who possesses your hardware illegally.
Linux can be fairly well-secured against state-level threat actors, but honestly, if your adversary is your own nation-state, then no amount of security is going to protect you!
For Microsoft and the other consumer-OS vendors, it is typically a bad user-experience for any user, particularly a paying subscriber, to lose access to their account and their cloud apps. There are many ways to try and cajole the naïve user into storing their recovery key somewhere safe, but the best way is to just do it for them.
A recovery key stored in the user's own cloud account is going to be secure from the typical threats that consumers will face. I, for one, am thankful that there is peace of mind both from the on-device encryption, as well as the straightforward disaster recovery methods.
The problem is mass-surveillance and dragnets. Obviously if the state wants to go after you no laws will protect you. As we've seen they can even illegally collect evidence and then do a parallel construction to "launder" the evidence.
But One-drive is essentially a mass-surveillance tool. It's a way to load the contents of every single person's computer into Palentir or similar tools and, say, for instance, "give me a list of everyone who harbors anti-ICE sentiments."
By the way my windows computer nags me incessantly about "setting up backups" with no obvious way to turn off the nags, only a "remind me later" button. I assume at some point the option to not have backups will go away.
That's a reductionist view. Apple, at least, based a big portion of their image on privacy and encryption. If a company does that and is then proven otherwise, it does a tremendous damage to the brand and stock value and is something shareholders would absolutely sue the board and CEO for. Things like these happened many times in the past.
A Proton model makes this very simple: full cooperation and handover and virtually nothing to be extracted from the data. Size is somewhat of a metadata, ip connection points and maybe date of first use and when data changes occurred...
I'm all for law enforcement, but that job has to be old-school Proof of Work bound and not using blanket data collection and automated speeding ticket mailer.
But I guess it's not done more because the free data can't be analyzed and sold.
For a long time, if you used full disk encryption, the encryption key never left your machine. If you forgot your password, the data was gone - tough luck, should have made a backup. That's still how it works on Linux.
Pretty surprising they'd back up the disk encryption secrets to the cloud at all, IMHO, let alone that they'd back it up in plaintext.
That's why full disk encryption was always a no-go for approximately all computer users, and recommending it to someone not highly versed in technology was borderline malicious.
"Tough luck, should have made a backup" is higher responsibility than securing anything in meatspace, including your passport or government ID. In the real world, there is always a recovery path. Security aficionados pushing non-recoverable traps on people are plain disconnected from reality.
Microsoft has the right approach here with Bitlocker defaults. It's not merely about UX - it's about not setting up traps and footguns that could easily cause harm to people.
Google Authenticator used to be disconnected from reality like this. Users were asking how to copy the codes to another phone, and they said "you can't, WAI, should add the other phone as a second auth method on every site." Like how people say you shouldn't copy SSH privkeys. I figured out an undocumented way to do it on iPhone by taking an encrypted iTunes backup though.
Eventually they yielded on this, but their later updates had other usability traps. Because Google Auth was the household name for TOTP apps, this ruined TOTP's entire reputation.
I had hoped the average person would have a baseline understanding of how computers work by now. Baseline includes things like the difference between a web browser and a search engine, "the cloud" is someone else's computer, and encrypted means gone if you lose the password/key.
I am sad that this now appears unlikely. I suspect it may even be lower for people in their 20s today than a decade ago.
> Security aficionados pushing non-recoverable traps on people are plain disconnected from reality.
To be fair, if you inadvertently get locked out of your Google account "tough luck, should have used a different provider" and Gmail is a household name so ...
Less snarky, I think that there's absolutely nothing wrong with key escrow (either as a recovery avenue or otherwise) so long as it's opt in and the tradeoffs are made abundantly clear up front. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the route MS went.
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"Disconnected from reality" ... tell that to the people who have had a lost or stolen device without encryotion. You'd need a backup and then some!
Apple manages a recovery path for users without storing the key in plain text. Must have something to do with those "security aficionados."
Well, for a consumer notebook or mobile device, the threat model typically envisions a thief grabbing it from a coffeehouse or hotel room. So your key needs to be safeguarded from the opportunist who possesses your hardware illegally.
Linux can be fairly well-secured against state-level threat actors, but honestly, if your adversary is your own nation-state, then no amount of security is going to protect you!
For Microsoft and the other consumer-OS vendors, it is typically a bad user-experience for any user, particularly a paying subscriber, to lose access to their account and their cloud apps. There are many ways to try and cajole the naïve user into storing their recovery key somewhere safe, but the best way is to just do it for them.
A recovery key stored in the user's own cloud account is going to be secure from the typical threats that consumers will face. I, for one, am thankful that there is peace of mind both from the on-device encryption, as well as the straightforward disaster recovery methods.
The problem is mass-surveillance and dragnets. Obviously if the state wants to go after you no laws will protect you. As we've seen they can even illegally collect evidence and then do a parallel construction to "launder" the evidence.
But One-drive is essentially a mass-surveillance tool. It's a way to load the contents of every single person's computer into Palentir or similar tools and, say, for instance, "give me a list of everyone who harbors anti-ICE sentiments."
By the way my windows computer nags me incessantly about "setting up backups" with no obvious way to turn off the nags, only a "remind me later" button. I assume at some point the option to not have backups will go away.
2 replies →
> Well, for a consumer notebook or mobile device, the threat model typically envisions a thief grabbing it from a coffeehouse or hotel room.
...in which case having a cloud backup of the full disk encryption key is pointless, because you don't have access to the disk any more.
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Exactly. Being again and again surprised that corporations will defend you for literally no reason is kinda delusional.
That's a reductionist view. Apple, at least, based a big portion of their image on privacy and encryption. If a company does that and is then proven otherwise, it does a tremendous damage to the brand and stock value and is something shareholders would absolutely sue the board and CEO for. Things like these happened many times in the past.
This isn't that simple.
A Proton model makes this very simple: full cooperation and handover and virtually nothing to be extracted from the data. Size is somewhat of a metadata, ip connection points and maybe date of first use and when data changes occurred... I'm all for law enforcement, but that job has to be old-school Proof of Work bound and not using blanket data collection and automated speeding ticket mailer.
But I guess it's not done more because the free data can't be analyzed and sold.