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Comment by cmarschner | Hacker News Reader

Naive quedtion perhaps, bit why wouldn't they be able to employ the same hardware on icloud than on the phone?

Uploading the encrypted content has no value as backup, if you don't have keys that can decrypt it. If the keys are backed up as well, all security is gone.

Is it that hard to have the phone display an encryption key and have the user copy it to dead tree?

As above, not a good idea for a default, but don't see why it wouldn't be technically viable for opt-in protection.

The hardware key is designed to be impossible to extract from the device. That's part of the security, so you can't simply transfer the data to a phone where protections against brute-forcing the user key have been removed.

> An encryption key

To spell it out (1) request new encryption key from device (let's call it key4cloud); (2) encryption key generated, displayed for physical logging by the user, & stored in the secure enclave; (3) all normal backups to iCloud are now encrypted via key4cloud; (4) user loses phone; (5) user purchases new phone; (6) new phone downloads data; (7) user enters key4cloud from physical notes & decrypts backup

Yes, it requires paper and a pencil and user education (hence the opt-in). But it's also incredibly resistant to "Give us all iCloud data on User Y."

It can be the same hardware but I believe that not usually meant with "hardware based encryption". The point is that the private keys never leave the hardware of the phone, thus making it secure. So they could employ the same hardware but the hardware does not have the necessary keys.

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