Comment by rvnx
2 years ago
Concrete example of such backdoors: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
The system is protecting you against Apple employees, but not against law enforcement.
No matter how much layer of technology you put, at the end of the day, the US companies have to respect the law of the US.
The requests can be routed to specific investigation / debugging / beta nodes.
Just to turn-on a flag on specific users.
It's not like ultimate privacy, but at least it will prevent Apple engineers from snooping into private chatlogs.
(like some pervert at Gmail was stalking a little girl https://www.gawkerarchives.com/5637234/gcreep-google-enginee... , or Zuckerberg himself reading chatlogs https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2010/03/mark-zuckerberg-alle... )
The Bloomberg SuperMicro implant in its various forms is an exceptionally poor example here: it's been widely criticized, never corroborated, and, Apple's Private Compute architecture has extensive mitigation against every type of purported attack in the various forms the SuperMicro story has taken. UEFI/BIOS backdoors, implanted chips affecting the BMC firmware, and malicious/tampered storage device firmware are all accounted for in the Private Compute trust model.
I can't believe Bloomberg still hasn't retracted that article. As other commenters have indicated - it has never in any way been corroborated.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-h...
That article is literally completely made up and didn't happen.
> The requests can be routed to specific investigation / debugging / beta nodes.
No, this is not possible with the design of PCC; they can't control how your requests are routed and there cannot be nodes with extra debugging.
The threat is real but that article is disinformation.
> Concrete example
This has not been corroborated and Bloomberg has not produced any supporting evidence.
iirc, no real proof was ever provided for that bloomberg article (despite it also never being retracted). many looked for the chips and from everything I heard there was never a concrete situation where this was discovered.
Doesn't make the possible threat less real (see recent news in Lebanon), but that story in particular seems to have not stood up to closer inquiry.