APFS in Detail

In June of 2016, Apple announced the file system that would be replacing HFS+: Apple File System (APFS). Adam Leventhal wrote a detailed series of posts about what’s coming in the new file system:

Apple announced a new file system that will make its way into all of its OS variants (macOS, tvOS, iOS, watchOS) in the coming years. Media coverage to this point has been mostly breathless elongations of Apple’s developer documentation. With a dearth of detail I decided to attend the presentation and Q&A with the APFS team at WWDC. Dominic Giampaolo and Eric Tamura, two members of the APFS team, gave an overview to a packed room; along with other members of the team, they patiently answered questions later in the day. With those data points and some first hand usage I wanted to provide an overview and analysis both as a user of Apple-ecosystem products and as a long-time operating system and file system developer.

Beyond losing the mass of technical debt accumulated in HFS+, the feature that appeals to me most is encryption becoming a first class citizen. This will be seamless to the end user, but provide for greater security going forward.

Multi-key encryption is particularly relevant for portables where all data might be encrypted, but unlocking your phone provides access to an additional key and therefore additional data.

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APFS (apparently) supports constant time cryptographic file system erase, called “effaceable” in the diskutil output. This presumably builds a secret key that cannot be extracted from APFS and encrypts the file system with it. A secure erase then need only delete the key rather than needing to scramble and re-scramble the full disk to ensure total eradication.

Quite interestingly, APFS will be adding I/O QoS:

APFS also focuses on latency; Apple’s number one goal is to avoid the beachball of doom. APFS addresses this with I/O QoS (quality of service) to prioritize accesses that are immediately visible to the user over background activity that doesn’t have the same time-constraints. This is inarguably a benefit to users and a sophisticated file system capability.

I’m curious to see how much impact this will have in the real world, but conceptually it makes a lot of sense.

I also learned from Adam’s posts that if you want to experiment with prerelease APFS now, there is a bit of humor in avoiding interactive confirmation of the risks associated:

[diskutil] prompts you for interactive confirmation of the destructive power of APFS unless this is added to the command-line: -IHaveBeenWarnedThatAPFSIsPreReleaseAndThatIMayLoseData; I’m not making this up

1Password Adds Support for Intel Secure Enclave

The great folks over at AgileBits are updating 1Password with support for Intel’s SGX Secure Enclave technology.

You might reasonably think that your data is encrypted directly by your Master Password (and your secret Account Key), but there are a number of technical reasons why that wouldn’t be a good idea. Instead, your Master Password is used to derive a key encryption key which is used to encrypt a master key. The details differ for our different data formats, but here is a little ditty from our description of the OPVault data format to be sung to the tune of Dry Bones.

Each item key’s encrypted with the master key And the master key’s encrypted with the derived key And the derived key comes from the MP Oh hear the word of the XOR Them keys, them keys, them random keys (3x) Oh hear the word of the XOR

And that is a simplification! But it is the appropriate simplification for what I want to talk about today: Some of our intrepid 1Password for Windows beta testers can start using a version of 1Password 6 for Windows that will have an extra protection on that “master key” described in that song. We have been working with Intel over the past few months to bring the protection of Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) to 1Password.

Soon (some time this month) 1Password for Windows customers running on systems that support Intel’s SGX will have another layer of protection around some of their secrets.

Having AgileBitskeep up to date on the latest security technologies is one of many reasons I use 1Password to store anything I need kept secure. If you aren’t already using a password manager, I can’t recommend 1Password enough.