SEAR and the Apple team does an excellent job of security on iOS, and should be commended greatly on that.
Not only are they willing to develop hardware features and plumb that throughout the entire stack, they're willing to look at ITW exploits and work on ways to mitigate that. PPL was super interesting, they decided it wasn't 100% effective so they ditched it and came up with other thigs.
Apple's vertical makes it 'easy' to do this compared to Android where they have to convince the CPU guys at QC or Mediatek to build a feature, convince the linux kernel to take it, get it in AOSP, get it in upstream LLVM, etc etc.
Pointer authentication codes (PAC) is a good example, Apple said f-it we'll do it ourselves. They maintained a downstream fork of LLVM, and built full support, leveraged in the wild bypasses and fixed those up.
One of the knock on benefits of this too is increased security across all platforms as long as someone exercises that code path on one of apples new processors with a hardened runtime.
In theory it makes it easier to catch stuff that you can’t simply catch with static analysis and it gives you some level of insight beyond simply crashing.
And after all that hardcore engineering work is done, iMessage still has code paths leading to dubious code running in the kernel, enabling 0-click exploits to still be a thing.
Google could have added MTE for a couple of years now, but apparently don't want to force it on OEMs as part of their Android certification program, it is the same history as with OS updates.
to be fair, most of MTE's benefit is realized by having enough users running your apps with MRE enabled, rather than having it everywhere.
This is because MTE facilitate finding memory bugs and fixing them - but also consumes (physical!) space and power. If enough folks run it with, say Chrome, you get to find and fix most of its memory bugs and it benefits everyone else (minus the drawbacks, since everyone else has MTE off or not present).
trade offs, basically. At least on pixel you can decide on your own
They do that now because they care about your security, but to make it difficult to modify (jailbreak) your own devices to run your own software that is not approved by Apple.
What they do is against your interests, for them to keep the monopoly on the App Store.
Whenever I read about it, I am surprised at the complexity of iOS security. At the hardware level, kernel level, all the various types of sandboxing.
Is this duct tape over historical architectural decisions that assumed trust? Could we design something with less complexity if we designed it from scratch? Are there any operating systems that are designed this way?
It’s been designed with lower user trust since day one, unlike other OSes of the era (consumer Windows, Mac’s classic OS).
Just how much you can trust the user has changed overtime. And of course the device has picked up a lot of a lot of of capabilities and new threats such as always on networking in various forms and the fun of a post Spectre world.
I think that there's also inherent trust in "hardware security" but as we all know its all just hardcoded software at the end of the day, and complexity will bring bugs more frequently.
Security in this context means the intruder is you, and Apple is securing their device so you can't run code on it, without asking Apple for permission first.
Any sufficiently secure system is, by design, also secure against it's primary user. In the business world this takes the form of protecting the business from its own employees in addition to outside threats.
SEAR and the Apple team does an excellent job of security on iOS, and should be commended greatly on that.
Not only are they willing to develop hardware features and plumb that throughout the entire stack, they're willing to look at ITW exploits and work on ways to mitigate that. PPL was super interesting, they decided it wasn't 100% effective so they ditched it and came up with other thigs.
Apple's vertical makes it 'easy' to do this compared to Android where they have to convince the CPU guys at QC or Mediatek to build a feature, convince the linux kernel to take it, get it in AOSP, get it in upstream LLVM, etc etc.
Pointer authentication codes (PAC) is a good example, Apple said f-it we'll do it ourselves. They maintained a downstream fork of LLVM, and built full support, leveraged in the wild bypasses and fixed those up.
One of the knock on benefits of this too is increased security across all platforms as long as someone exercises that code path on one of apples new processors with a hardened runtime.
In theory it makes it easier to catch stuff that you can’t simply catch with static analysis and it gives you some level of insight beyond simply crashing.
And after all that hardcore engineering work is done, iMessage still has code paths leading to dubious code running in the kernel, enabling 0-click exploits to still be a thing.
That's one way to look at it, but if perfection is the only goal post then no one would ever get anywhere.
Disable iMessage via Apple Configurator MDM policy and enable Lockdown Mode.
I imagine the latter is sufficient.
PS: make sure you remove that pesky "USB accessories while locked allowed" profile that Configurator likes to sneak in.
What's the dubious code?
Running something in the kernel is unavoidable if you want to actually show stuff to the user.
[dead]
Google could have added MTE for a couple of years now, but apparently don't want to force it on OEMs as part of their Android certification program, it is the same history as with OS updates.
to be fair, most of MTE's benefit is realized by having enough users running your apps with MRE enabled, rather than having it everywhere.
This is because MTE facilitate finding memory bugs and fixing them - but also consumes (physical!) space and power. If enough folks run it with, say Chrome, you get to find and fix most of its memory bugs and it benefits everyone else (minus the drawbacks, since everyone else has MTE off or not present).
trade offs, basically. At least on pixel you can decide on your own
Don't the Pixels have MTE? Definitely GrapheneOS does, at least to some extent.
Kind of, you need to enable it on developer tools, also Pixels are Google's, not the other OEMs.
https://developer.android.com/ndk/guides/arm-mte
https://source.android.com/docs/security/test/memory-safety/...
They do that now because they care about your security, but to make it difficult to modify (jailbreak) your own devices to run your own software that is not approved by Apple.
What they do is against your interests, for them to keep the monopoly on the App Store.
It can be both things, security and user lock in, those are orthogonal goals.
Loosely related, but they also announced an increase in their bug bounty program during Ivan Krstić's Keynote at Hexacon. [0]
[0] https://security.apple.com/blog/apple-security-bounty-evolve...
Whenever I read about it, I am surprised at the complexity of iOS security. At the hardware level, kernel level, all the various types of sandboxing.
Is this duct tape over historical architectural decisions that assumed trust? Could we design something with less complexity if we designed it from scratch? Are there any operating systems that are designed this way?
Vulnerabilities are inevitable, especially if you want to support broad use cases on a platform. Defense-in-depth is how you respond to this.
iOS is based on MacOS is based on NeXT is a Unix.
It’s been designed with lower user trust since day one, unlike other OSes of the era (consumer Windows, Mac’s classic OS).
Just how much you can trust the user has changed overtime. And of course the device has picked up a lot of a lot of of capabilities and new threats such as always on networking in various forms and the fun of a post Spectre world.
> seL4 is a fast, secure and formally verified microkernel with fine-grained access control and support for virtual machines.
https://medium.com/@tunacici7/sel4-microkernel-architecture-...
It's missing "the rest of the owl", so to speak, so it's a bit of a stretch to call it an operating system for anything more than research.
why not do both :)
I think that there's also inherent trust in "hardware security" but as we all know its all just hardcoded software at the end of the day, and complexity will bring bugs more frequently.
Security in this context means the intruder is you, and Apple is securing their device so you can't run code on it, without asking Apple for permission first.
It can be both.
Any sufficiently secure system is, by design, also secure against it's primary user. In the business world this takes the form of protecting the business from its own employees in addition to outside threats.
Have they fixed regular, unencrypted connections on updates and apps lunch yet?
https://sneak.berlin/20231005/apple-operating-system-surveil...