Comment by ggm

5 months ago

Can you explain which keys in the secure enclave make this work because it has at least two keysets: a public-private keypair locked to the root key Apple instantiated in hardware as fused links in the chip and so in theory this could include private keys common to all the devices in this chipset generation, and the locally generated unique keys which are tied to this specific device.

Using the first pair or products of the first pair, means in principle your private key is protected by the goodwill of Apple only: if you allow it to exist at rest in a form only this shroud protects, then Apple can read the private key unless the symmetric algorithm used to "unlock this private key with your password" is a good one, and you chose a password wisely. I haven't used the function so I can't comment how they constrain what you put in as a personal lock on these blobs.

I am not a cryptographer.