Comment by arghwhat
20 hours ago
That hardware is completely unrelated to such a simple feature. Something like AirDrop will only use fairly trivial crypto, which most likely ciphers with full acceleration available but even without it would work fine with plenty of performance headroom.
Neither Apple nor Google is doing anything revolutionary with their silicon for such a standard compute task. It's really mostly minor tuning to get a more optimal part instead of an off-the-shelf chip catering to other uses too, with die area and power consumption "wasted" in your setup.
Could be special needs for the radios
Could it be that this process needs to be running in a secure enclave
No, not at all. Someone even implemented AirDrop in Python before[1]. In fact, nothing ever needs such special hardware. It's a decision of the implementer if they'd like to get fancy and rely on such hardware in their implementation to change its security profile, but the iPhone at the other end or any Apple infrastructure would be none the wiser - they just see that they're getting appropriately signed or encrypted, and neither knows nor cares how that came to be. Use of a hardware security module would just make the process more tamper resistant but would not otherwise change the outcome.
1. https://github.com/seemoo-lab/opendrop
Relies on OWL which does have specific hardware requirements
1 reply →