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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

When you disable ADP, your local encryption keys are uploaded to Apple's servers to be read by them.

Apple could just lock you out of iCloud until you do this.

That’s exactly the plan. Anyone with this enabled in the UK will need to manually disable it or they’ll get locked out of their iCloud account after a deadline.

And I guess Apple gets fined for not allowing government approved alternatives to these services not long after.

The hardware will not allow this, at least not without modifications. The encryption keys are not exportable from the Secure Enclave, not even to Apple's own servers.

Are you gonna unlock that phone anytime soon?

Thanks for opening the enclave, don't mind if I ship these keys back home.

No notification needed, Apple has root access.

Assuming the enclave can receive OTA firmware updates and those updates can completely compromise it, which are not actually proven facts, there's no way to target this to the UK alone without either exempting tourists and creating a black market for loophole phones or else turning all of Britain into a "set foot here and ruin your iPhone forever" zone.

Unless I am making a mistake here, you still can't extract keys of an opened enclave. You can just run operations against those keys.

The Apple security paper describe how to disable ADP through a key rotation sequence.

This will be a "forced rotation", they just need to decide how to communicate to users and work out what happens to those who don't comply. Lockout until key rotation look like an option as someone said.

Yeah, this seems the most likely thing to happen here. You'll be forced to disable ADP to continue using iCloud in the UK. This still leaves the question of tourists and other visitors, but it at least fits within the parameters of the system without changing its fundamentals.

Naive question: what prevents Apple from pushing a malicious software update that automatically disables ADP to UK users?

Behind the scenes, it'd probably decrypt it locally piece-by-piece with the key in the Secure Enclave, and then reencrypt it with a new key that Apple has a copy of when you disable ADP.

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