[purkka]

The flipside of this is availability. Your T2 coprocessor is now permanently tied to your data. This means if the chip dies, there's no recovery unless you have a backup encrypted with a separate key (with its own confidentiality/availability tradeoff).

(And if anything else on your motherboard dies, Apple's official answer is "you're f*cked", since they refuse to do board-level repair.)

For the threat model of most users, where hardware-based targeted attacks aren't a big concern, this is a bad tradeoff.

[ajross]

It's sort of a weird space we're in in the modern world, where you have to assume that anything on a "device" is ephemeral and fragile, and those of us concerned with data persistence on local hardware need to work at having a path to verifiably-restorable backups.

Cloud is a great solution for most people. But not really an option for "where do I put my decades-stale collection of old home directories" or "mbox files from email in the late 90's".

[wesamco]

> For the threat model of most users, where hardware-based targeted attacks aren't a big concern, this is a bad tradeoff.

> hardware-based targeted attacks

You mean physical-access attacks, correct? Is it really just these kinds of attacks that a T2 chip protects against?

AFAIK if malware has super user privilege, it can access the RAM of other processes, and therefore it can access the encryption keys stored in RAM by other processes.

If those processes could have used an encryption API that does the encryption on the chip, and therefore not need to store encryption keys in RAM, they'd be protected against this kind of attack, a kind of attack that is not hardware-based.

[moe_sc]

Considering those keys are loaded into RAM for/whilst unencripting, i don't see how it matters, cause the malware should have access to the (now) unencripted data regardless.

[dmitrygr]

> if the chip dies,

I've heard of zero T2s dying. I've hard of android data recovered (TFA)