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Comment by jesseendahl | Hacker News Reader

>So I don't really understand how this can be said to be a hardware security token.

No one claimed it's a hardware security token, but the private keys are stored in iCloud Keychain, which is end-to-end encrypted. Apple cannot access your private keys even if iCloud is compromised by an external attacker or employee.

If you're curious about the security engineering, you should watch the "Synchronizing secrets" part of this Black Hat talk from 2016: https://youtu.be/BLGFriOKz6U?t=1353 or you should read the "Synchronization security" section of the "About the security of passkeys" support doc: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213305

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But Appel could deactivate E2E encryption without your knowledge to get all your keys. For instance on request of government agencies.

This is indistinguishable from the "I don't trust my computer" threat model. Apple could also surreptitiously scrape your screen or copy your processes' memory.

It’s not, because law enforcement considers your computer as private property, while anything you upload on the cloud is seizable without warrant. I’m not joking, it was rapported on HN at the time of the Snowden leaks that NSA can legally monitor your data as long as you transmit it over the wire.

The difference is the effort it takes. Deactivating E2E is just a flag.

There is no need to mess with the E2E, the client installed on your machine is downloaded form their servers, they can just copy the data when it is decrypted locally.

I does not make sense to use a proprietary internet connected application on your machine and worry that that the servers might be nefarious.

If your threat model includes getting hacked by the government, then your only choice of OS would be some hardened open source OS with fully reproducible builds and no proprietary driver blobs installed.

And in which you have personally audited every line of code for extra confidence. /s

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