Behind the scenes of iOS and Mac Security
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a rare insider look at Apple's security architecture and the reasoning behind its hardware choices.
What it is
Ivan Krstic's Black Hat talk on Apple platform security, including the Find My design that uses elliptic curve key diversification to locate offline devices privately. It also covers hardware features such as the T2 chip and secure boot hardening.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2019 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Recommends PascLeRasc · 2019-12 · on “Ask HN: Best Talks of 2019?”
Behind the scenes of iOS and Mac Security: [this video] Good talk behind the reason for the T2 chip and some other Apple security stuff
Recommends paxswill · 2020-03 · on “Intel x86 Root of Trust: Loss of Trust”
I'm curious if Apple's work on hardening their secure boot process on x86 affects this at all? For this unaware, this [0] video covers it over about seven minutes. Basically they claim to be enabling the IOMMU with a basic deny everything policy so that when the changeover to executing from RAM occurs and PCIe devices are brought up the IOMMU is able to deny possible malicious access to the firmware image. It sounds from the end of the article that there are separate DMA/IOMMU processes for the CSME, but I'm not familiar enough with stuff this far down to know for certain. [this video]
Cites onedognight · 2020-02 · on “Defeating a Laptop's BIOS Password”
Apple has been moving their defenses earlier and earlier in the boot process. According to this talk[0] they are even able to foil malicious option ROM[1] and other early boot attacks. I don’t recall if they mention boot passwords specifically, but they claim to lead the industry in this regard. [0] [this video] [1] [LINK]
Cites Sirened · 2022-05 · on “How Apple overcame its culture of secrecy to create AirPods Pro”
Apple (at least their security org) has done this before with their talks at Blackhat [1] where they've detailed pieces of their boot chain and interesting challenges they solved while building Find My's offline location feature [1]: [this video]