[lxgr]

True, but then they also added mandatory key escrow using server-side HSMs with no way to opt out – and these are by their nature much harder to audit than local secure enclaves.

In other words, with Firefox you trust the security of your device, whereas with Apple you trust the security of their entire ecosystem. In most cases, that's probably even a good thing, but I wouldn't exactly label one as strictly better than the other in all scenarios.

[astrange]

You can opt out.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212520

Although, I don't think that was accurate for iCloud Keychain anyway.

[lxgr]

I don't think this actually opts you out of key escrow these days. It only replaces SMS-OTP with the recovery key, as far as I understand.

It's impossible to tell, though – Apple's platform security guide has been last updated in April 2022, which predates Advanced Data Protection. (Weirdly they do mention it in the document [1], though, so the date might also be incorrect and they might have added that information since I last looked a year ago.)

At least according to [2], it seems possible to gain access to the encrypted data using the iCloud account password and the passcode/login password of one other device on the iCloud account in any case.

[1] https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...

[2] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202303

[ramesh31]

>At least according to [2], it seems possible to gain access to the encrypted data using the iCloud account password and the passcode/login password of one other device on the iCloud account in any case.

But iCloud access is forced to 2FA with one of your signed in devices, which requires the local password (pin, touch id, or face id, all of which never leave the enclave) to approve. There's really no way to get something covered by ADP short of physical device access + a stolen/coerced pin number.