And you are here why?

/via https://bit.ly/2HKytRW If you have encrypted data up there in the cloud (•) you’ve probably run across  key rotation . It’s good practice —  very  good practice — and exists for some fairly straightforward reasons • Encryption stales .  Sometimes it’s just a matter of time (DES was awesome in 1977. Now, not so much). So if your encryption algorithm can be broken in  N  years, you probably want to rotate it in some period smaller than  N , no? And yeah,  N  isn’t necessarily “ heat death of the universe ” because you’re using 4096-bit keys. Things change — key leaks, quantum encryption,  NSA loopholes , whatever. The safe thing to do is just rotate your  signing key  —   and, potentially, the algorithm too !— every so often (••) • Keys Leak . It happens, and for a host of reasons, ranging from “ whyTF did you write it down on a Post-it? ” to state-actors. In either case, keys do leak. The safe thing to do is rotate yo...

There is a nice writeup on this at Lawfare .  (TL;DR -  holding on to keys in a safe way such that 3rd parties can also access them repeatedly without high potential for catastrophic loss is impossibly hard) ...Apple’s design intentionally solved the problems that come from exceptional access schemes by removing itself from the equation. Rather than providing an exceptional access solution, Apple took the radical step of destroying those keys in order to have an acceptable level of protection.   [To] turn Apple’s Cloud Key Vault into an exceptional access mechanism....Apple would have to replace the HSM with one that accepts an additional message from Apple or the FBI—or an agency from any of the 100+ countries where Apple sells iPhones—saying “OK, decrypt,” as well as the user’s password. In order to do this securely, these messages would have to be cryptographically signed with a second set of keys, which would then have to be used as often as law enforcement ac...