Encrypted Backups … The Backdoor Into Your Life, or a User Disaster in the Making?
I’ve have used an Apple Macbook Pro for many years, and it has served me well. While Windows often feels like it is still the same old operating system that I used in the 20th Century, undernealth, my Mac can drop happily into a near native Unix-like terminal. It seems, too, that Apple has always taken their security seriously, and their security settings on devices just seem so natural to use. And so with our devices holding virtually every single part of our lives, it has never been so important for encryption to play a core part in every aspect of storage, transporting and processing our data. This must increasing include the backup of data.
But how should we backup? Should we backup to a trusted vendor, and who will keep a copy of our encryption key — just in case we lose it? Or should we go for a full end-to-end backup, and where the user stores the key, and only they can recover it. For many investigators, encryption is the method that give them cold sweats, and a world with complete end-to-end encryption would possibly shut the door on a mine of data.
So how will the tech companies improve security, whilst keeping law enforcement agencies off the back. The answer is … backups to the Cloud. If these are made non-encrypted, or where the key is stored with the backup, it…
