Security News > 2021 > August > Apple: CSAM Image-Detection Backdoor ‘Narrow’ in Scope

Privacy groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation warned that the process of flagging CSAM images essentially narrows the definition of end-to-end encryption to allow client-side access - which essentially means Apple is building a backdoor into its data storage, it said.

"Apple can explain at length how its technical implementation will preserve privacy and security in its proposed backdoor, but at the end of the day, even a thoroughly documented, carefully thought-out, and narrowly scoped backdoor is still a backdoor," The EFF said in reaction to the Apple announcement.

The image is not shared with the parent, only a notification, Apple added.

"The system is designed so that a user need not trust Apple, any other single entity, or even any set of possibly colluding entities from the same sovereign jurisdiction to be confident that the system is functioning as advertised," Apple said.

"Any perceptual hashes appearing in only one participating child-safety organization's database, or only in databases from multiple agencies in a single sovereign jurisdiction, are discarded by this process, and not included in the encrypted CSAM database that Apple includes in the operating system," Apple's document explained.

"Since no remote updates of the database are possible, and since Apple distributes the same signed operating system image to all users worldwide, it is not possible - inadvertently or through coercion - for Apple to provide targeted users with a different CSAM database," the company explained.

News URL

https://threatpost.com/apple-image-detection-backdoor/168727/