Behind the scenes of iOS and Mac Security

Black Hat · 36.3K views · 2020-01-15 · 44:29

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

Recommended as a rare insider look at Apple's security architecture and the reasoning behind its hardware choices.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2019–2022

Topics

Security & hacking Cryptography Privacy, surveillance & cybercrime

What people said

paxswill · 2020-03 · Recommendation
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. [VIDEO]
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PascLeRasc · 2019-12 · Recommendation
Behind the scenes of iOS and Mac Security: [VIDEO] Good talk behind the reason for the T2 chip and some other Apple security stuff
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Sirened · 2022-05 · Reference
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]: [VIDEO]
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Sources

Video by Black Hat, played through YouTube.

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