Sure, the NSA, GCHQ and Mossad have a way to exfiltrate the unencrypted data but proprietary e2e is a good thing for most people IMO. Shifts the risk from "my messages are theoretically available to most law enforcement in the globe" to "YOU’RE STILL GONNA BE MOSSAD’ED UPON"[0]. This is specially good for me because I know the equivalent to the FBI where is live is too cheap to buy a Cellebrite [1] license.
[0] https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1401_08-12_mickens.pdf [1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/leaker-reveals-which...
EDIT: I suppose someone could ask about Meta. The reason behind their support for scanning (and removing e2e in facebook msg) is simply regulatory capture. The zucc wishes to have a letter of marque to "protect" your children and remove the "unsafe" competitors.
EDIT2: Used the wrong term, I mixed up exfiltration channel with sidechannel attack.
Watching memory changing on a complex code base without having said code base is near impossible.
1. Run code 2. Watch memory changes 3. Correlate those to real data
If your code is doing anything complicated that's an intense thing to determine. If you're deep enough for a side channel there's likely a lot easier way of getting in.
My mental model is that most competent intelligence agencies have a PRISM 3.0 deal with FAANG, including on E2E products or at least have devs on the payroll. I imagine that any backdoor is only used on important targets, so no intel sharing with Cletus the deputy.
What financial gain do they get from this?
A: risk billions in stock value and customer purchases for basically a "thanks" from the gov? One whistleblower would also have the real ability of becoming world famous for "exposing" apple.
B: Get publicity actually resisting the gov and not lying, what is the gov gonna do? I imagine it has and does happen but I also imagine there's a crying tim apple being dragged through it painfully.
Unlike google I just don't see the financial positives for them to do it beyond massive arm twisting. For many companies the risk of destroying their entire value to customers is just not worth it.
The only money in it is mass scale data collection for training data and ads, if they aren't doing that any other method is the opposite of valuable it's a massive liability.
From a liability standpoint that implies a security breach could result in massive loss of customer data and if it did occur would destroy their privacy image to their customers.
I agree with the point that what you actually trust is the company to not insert maliscous code or keys into your protected path but modern systems actually contain ways to truly lock out the company itself from seeing your data.
Security wise it's amazing. If a company's admin cannot take your data it's excedingly hard for a hacker to do so.
I'm not sure what you mean by "custom methods", but I'm not saying they have bypassed the e2e encryption - I'm just saying that they technically could.
And as for why they would do that, they might get compelled by a government to do it secretly. As far as I know that hasn't happened yet but I see no reason it couldn't and it would take a whistleblower to find out.
> Security wise it's amazing. If a company's admin cannot take your data it's excedingly hard for a hacker to do so.
I agree, it is the best option available. But Apple/Meta are technically lying when they say it's impossible for them to read your messages.
As a company you'd be asking for an internal implosion of your company if everything had an additional backdoor in it.
Any backdoor added is a backdoor the thousands to tens of thousands of advanced hackers are always actively trying to breach. So if they do it they'd be doing it very selectively via special served code.
It's also the only way they'd stop whistle blowers.
Now that I say it. That's 100% what they would do. But again it's a crazy high risk almost zero reward action for them. Is the CIA paying apple a bajillion dollars for phones? No so why unless their arm is twisted would they risk billions of dollars for basically no gain?
This is not bulletproof, because they can potentially change the code to do this - this is what the FBI vs Apple thing was a few years ago was all about.
If the company is misleading, any encryption technology is irrelevant anyway.
This is for example why Lavabit chose to go out of business instead of giving up their keys.
Which apple does.
It's largely academic though, as almost nobody opts-in to escalated e2e posture in apple services unless they're a high risk person (journalist, dissident, etc).
The headaches that come from e2e everything are too great for most people.
That's obviously only the case if they aren't also the sole providers of the "ends".
1. 3rd party audit of a current repo hash 2. Public hosting of hash 3. Modern attested compute can check the current startup and running code hash and return to the user for their own checks. 4. User encrypts the last known hash they used or trust a 3rd party to perform the check like azure's methods.
Another way is to open source it and repeat 2/3/4
The way around that requires either a backdoor in attested hardware which would be wild if discovered because it's the same tech protecting companies and governments most sensitive info so they're all incentivised to audit that.
In a technical sense it's absolutely possible. Owning the servers != transferring keys to the servers. Most E2E apps run both client and servers, it's about if they ever had key access.
But when Apple etc. control both ends, their app could always see your data locally because it is the one that encrypts it to upload to the server in the first place. And these companies can receive secret orders from the US government to add backdoors into the local app and there's nothing you can do or say about it, except go out of business (like Lavabit).