Apple's iMessage encryption trips up feds' surveillance

SweX · Apr 4, 2013

Encryption used in Apple's iMessage chat service has stymied attempts by federal drug enforcement agents to eavesdrop on suspects' conversations, an internal government document reveals.

An internal Drug Enforcement Administration document seen by CNET discusses a February 2013 criminal investigation and warns that because of the use of encryption, "it is impossible to intercept iMessages between two Apple devices" even with a court order approved by a federal judge.

Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, said yesterday that "Apple's service is not designed to be government-proof."
"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."

The DEA says that "iMessages between two Apple devices are considered encrypted communication and cannot be intercepted, regardless of the cell phone service provider." But, if the messages are exchanged between an Apple device and a non-Apple device, the agency says, they "can sometimes be intercepted, depending on where the intercept is placed."
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57577887-38/apples-imessage-encryption-trips-up-feds-surveillance/

siljaline · Apr 4, 2013

See also:

DEA can’t wiretap iMessages, says they are a ‘challenge for intercept’
• http://venturebeat.com/2013/04/04/dea-imessage-wiretap/

Apple's iMessage encryption hindering DEA's ability to wiretap suspects
• http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/4/4182258/apple-imessage-encryption-blocking-dea-wiretap-attempts

TheWindBringeth · Apr 5, 2013

http://www.cato.org/blog/untappable-apple-or-dea-disinformation

Tech news site CNET has an interesting, but I suspect somewhat misleading, story today suggesting that text messages sent via Apple’s iMessage service—an Internet-based alternative to traditional cell phone SMS text messages—are “impossible to intercept” by law enforcement. Yet that is not quite what the document on which the story is based—an “intelligence note” distributed to law enforcement by the Drug Enfrocement Administration—actually says.

The DEA memo simply observes that, because iMessages are encrypted and sent via the Internet through Apple’s servers, a conventional wiretap installed at the cellular carrier’s facility isn’t going to catch those iMessages along with conventional text messages.
...
As cryptographer and computer scientist Matthew Green observes, there is a simple and intuitive way to test whether Apple (or any cloud storage provider) has the capability to access a user’s encrypted content stored in the cloud—as Apple’s iMessages are: The “mud puddle test.” If you slip in a mud puddle, destroying your iPhone (along with any locally stored encryption keys) and forgetting your passwords as a result of the bump on the head, can you still recover your data?
...
If you can—and with Apple’s iCloud services, you can—then the cloud provider must itself hold the keys to unlock that data. So iMessages may not be interceptable from a suspect’s cell carrier, but Apple has to be capable of handing them over when the authorities come knocking with a warrant.
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http://apple.stackexchange.com/ques...ce-deletes-it-in-all-of-the-other-icloud-sync

My experience is you cannot actually delete an iMessage once and have it delete elsewhere.

You can only delete the local cached copy of a message to suppress it being showed/stored on that one device. If you turn off iMessage and turn it back on, you will see the messages from iCloud come back whether you deleted a message or not.
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I am not convinced that simply deleting a message from the Messages app on an iOS device actually fully removes that message from the device that you sent / deleted from. One time I got tired of having a long list of old messages conversations so I deleted all of them. A few minutes later I was searching for something via spotlight on the same device & it started showing messages results with no actual conversations left in the messages app itself.
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Edit: Do you iMessage users think the system uses solid end-to-end encryption and protects the messages from Apple?

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