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by olliej 1340 days ago
sowbug has a more detailed answer, but the TLDR is the PBKDFs were consider ok a long time ago before the security implications were really understood. Essentially they're low entropy in practice (e.g. a person _could_ make a 10+ word password, but they're not going to for a password they have to enter frequently).

You're much better off using the password to a truly random key, though that of course immediately raises the question of how you store the true key :D Modern systems use some kind of HSM to protect the true keys, and if they're super integrated like the SEP (or possibly the SE, I can never recall which is which) on apple hardware they can simply never expose the actual keys and only provide handles and have the HSM encrypt and decrypt data directly before it's seen by the AP.

1 comments

"using the password to a truly random key"

should be

"using the password to gate access to a truly random key"