Apples new M1 microprocessor

[bd139]

Oh that sounds like one of those design by committee ideas that works on paper but the moment you hand it over to the NOC team they all start crying and leaping out of windows.

[SilverSolder]

[...] On top of that macOS now calls home to check binary signing on app startup. [...]

There is an element of this behaviour in Android too.  E.g., I have an older Android tablet in my car for looking at the CAN bus.  Every few months, I get an error message when I try to start the app, "App not owned!".   Riiight.   The cure is to take the tablet inside and let it connect to the Internet for a quick chat with the mother ship, after which the app is suddenly "owned" again.

The result is that Android is dead to me - I simply don't want to waste any time on it, at all.

[...]
Even as a long term Apple user I’m out. They can go to hell. This is a ridiculous proposition.

Apple and the other computer manufacturers are now just producing appliances and fashion accessories that you are expected to rent with monthly payments - you don't own anything, only the right to use it, in many cases on the condition that you accept being tracked and traced for someone else's commercial gain.

Recently, I have been testing some open source software graphics software - specifically, Inkscape, and the Gimp.  I was gobsmacked by how good they are compared to when I looked a decade ago.  And they have portable versions too, just put them on your computer and run...   -  It seems to me that open source may have come of age, finally.  -   Just in time, it seems... 

[Cerebus]

Oh that sounds like one of those design by committee ideas that works on paper but the moment you hand it over to the NOC team they all start crying and leaping out of windows.

I accidentally got involved in a Skype meeting about this that centred around the single, highly intransigent, person who controls IP address allocations for the entire 100,000 employee enterprise who couldn't get their head around having IP allocations that 'belonged' to more than one country's operating groups. Add the security people, also not exactly known for their flexible attitude, into the equation and the conversation got fun, not.  Meantime the poor ops guys in the meeting were just trying to find a way to make the thing work at all without getting their arses fried by management who'd set an arbitrary go-live date and then made contracts on that basis. Oh, and we were all working in different 'self managing' Aglile^TM* teams. My suspicion is that every single member of the ops team that was muted was probably audibly sobbing.

I was in the meeting because the data in their IPAM is so rotten that we couldn't use it for network automation/orchestration so my team, tasked with designing/writing network orchestration stuff, also had to forcibly head up an effort to clean up the IPAM database that nobody else gave a flying one about and was thereby forced to get involved in lot of things like this that were theoretically 'Not my problem, John.'.

*Twat Mark

[bd139]

Bwuhahahaha that's about right. /me goes and stares at the Netbox install full of lies. You want to see our AWS route tables - have one that is 98 lines long now to work around all the overlapping class B's from acqusitions

Not my problem very soon! 

[Marco]

Intel hasn't entirely been sitting still while this was coming BTW. Project Athena is producing some pretty spectacular battery life in ultra-portables too.

Of course PR wise Windows laptops are dragged down by the lowest common denominator, the unfortunate side effect of an open platform.

[Marco]

There is an element of this behaviour in Android too.

I expect it out of Android ... I find it strange Apple is letting this fester though, there is no real reason to check apps on startup. You can just get updated blacklists while online and check it against that, without leaking information.

Deals with the US federal government they can't get out under from?

[Mr. Scram]

Apple has already made fanless laptops in the past.  It's not impossible, but the real question is how well does it hold up under heavy workloads.

All well and good making claims like "3.5x faster" but if it can only run a benchmark like that for 10 seconds before thermally throttling...

I've heard reports that the big numbers come from hardware acceleration. Let's see what real life benchmarks and experience are like.

[bd139]

Best way to speed up your Mac:

https://youtu.be/gFm3brOdxcw

[Cerebus]

Before I watch it, what's the betting that that video is of a ballistic nature? 

[bd139]

Eventually maybe. Actually no much worse.

[Cerebus]

I was disappointed. I was expecting something along the lines of a trebuchet.

[tooki]

Apple has already made fanless laptops in the past.  It's not impossible, but the real question is how well does it hold up under heavy workloads.

All well and good making claims like "3.5x faster" but if it can only run a benchmark like that for 10 seconds before thermally throttling...

In the presentation, they somewhat hint at that in the Air, because with the MacBook Pro, they mentioned sustained performance for extended number crunching.

For what it’s worth, analysis of and benchmarks on the latest iPads’ A14 SOC (which is without doubt less powerful than M1) are very, very impressive.

[magic]

Also iMessage end to end encryption is apparently no longer appearing in documentation.

Was end to end peer authentication ever in there or could The Cloud set you up for a very private and secure session with the NSA?

My familiarity with "secure communications" stuff kinda ends on protocols like PGP and SSH and the resulting conclusion that you can have security or convenience but not both. And Apple users surely demand the latter, so hmm...

[tooki]

Also iMessage end to end encryption is apparently no longer appearing in documentation.

Was end to end peer authentication ever in there or could The Cloud set you up for a very private and secure session with the NSA?

My familiarity with "secure communications" stuff kinda ends on protocols like PGP and SSH and the resulting conclusion that you can have security or convenience but not both. And Apple users surely demand the latter, so hmm...

Does it not get exhausting, thinking people are always lying and/or out to get you?!?

Anyhow, when it comes to Apple’s security, they document it pretty well. Attached is the current edition of their platform security guide. Page 99 is where iMessage’s architecture begins.

As for whether iMessage isn’t end-to-end encrypted any more: aside from it being absurd to assume IMHO, the only real proof would be a comparison to the next edition of the platform security guide, with it showing a totally different architecture.

[SilverSolder]

[...]
Does it not get exhausting, thinking there’s always someone out to get you?!?
[...]

Au contraire, it makes me feel WANTED! 

[bd139]

More trouble...

https://twitter.com/patrickwardle/status/1327726496203476992

[magic]

Anyhow, when it comes to Apple’s insecurity, they document it pretty well. Attached is the current edition of their platform security guide. Page 99 is where iMessage’s architecture begins.

FTFY

So to save Dave's bandwidth bills and other people's time:
On the receiving side, each user account on each iDevice generates a keypair and the public key is uploaded to Apple.
On the sending side, all public keys of the addressee are downloaded from Apple and the message is separately encrypted with each of them so that any device can read it.

Apple can generate a rogue keypair, add the public key to the list requested by the sender and decrypt the message. Meanwhile Apple users are getting excited over whether the protocol uses end to end encryption or not

Does it not get exhausting, thinking people are always lying and/or out to get you?!?

For the record...
We know that FBI already tried to get Apple to decrypt user data for them.
We know that Twitter accounts have been pwned by social engineering attacks on the employees.
We know that NSA had their wiretaps installed at a major US ISP.

[bd139]

That's why I keep all my terrorist activity on pen and paper 

[Marco]

Apple can generate a rogue keypair

That's no different thant whatsapp, just because system which has integrated key distribution can set up a MitM attack doesn't mean the fact they say they won't is somehow invalid. Not too many people do physical key exchange and pinning with the apps which support it.

[tooki]

Does it not get exhausting, thinking people are always lying and/or out to get you?!?

For the record...
We know that FBI already tried to get Apple to decrypt user data for them.
We know that Twitter accounts have been pwned by social engineering attacks on the employees.
We know that NSA had their wiretaps installed at a major US ISP.

And how do any of those things justify your unfounded claims of Apple products being insecure? Apple refused to break its security to help the FBI. Twitter is unrelated. Apple isn’t an ISP.

[bd139]

Our security guys just pulled the entire company’s macOS deployment (200 seats) this afternoon over the firewall drama. Turns out you can use it to exfiltrate data through NSUrlSession bypassing mandated corporate VPN. This is because Apple sees fit that their own software doesn’t have to live with the same rules as everyone else’s and bypasses it entirely opening a side channel. That’s a terrible security decision.

Fortunately not my funeral.

[magic]

That's no different thant whatsapp, just because system which has integrated key distribution can set up a MitM attack doesn't mean the fact they say they won't is somehow invalid. Not too many people do physical key exchange and pinning with the apps which support it.

I'm not comparing iMessage with competitors. I'm not even familiar with those products and don't use them.
Just stating the obvious: if a consumer vendor tells you they can't read your data, they usually are bullshitting you. As shown above, you often don't even need to dig very deep to reach the "just trust me dude" parts.
There are systems which try to actually be resilient against vendor compromise, but they are niche and harder to use.

And how do any of those things justify your unfounded claims of Apple products being insecure?

Well, they say they can't read your messages. I shown that they almost certainly can. Their system fails to meet their own security specification, I guess that would be deserving of a CVE if anyone actually took such things seriously in the first place

That's why I keep all my terrorist activity on pen and paper 

You may keep your terrorist activity on paper, but if there are other less savvy terrorists in the UK, one day you may find all your messages exfiltrated to some spooks for "threat monitoring". I hope you trust Her Majesty's IT department

[tooki]

And how do any of those things justify your unfounded claims of Apple products being insecure?

Well, they say they can't read your messages. I shown that they almost certainly can. Their system fails to meet their own security specification, I guess that would be deserving of a CVE if anyone actually took such things seriously in the first place

Except that you haven’t shown that at all, you’ve only claimed it. There are now billions of iMessage-capable devices in the wild. Logic dictates that if it were as trivial to crack as you claim, someone would have done it by now and claimed a bounty from Apple and respect from the infosec community.

If iMessage were insecure, never mind trivially insecure, there would be rampant abuse of said vulnerabilities. But there isn’t, which certainly lends credence to Apple’s claims. Apple has been making privacy a major pillar of its product advertisement. Don’t you think that is nothing short of an invitation for security researchers to bang on it long and hard? And yet, still no cracks have been found.

[Halcyon]

It'll be interesting to see what happens and how Apple decide to implement it.

Apple's desktop/laptop market share has held steady for many years now, hovering somewhere between 9.5-10.0%. There hasn't really been any significant growth and anecdotally, I'm seeing and hearing of more people dropping Apple products than there are people switching to them.

They need to stop this cycle of pissing their loyal fan base off, because they are slowly dwindling.

If iMessage were insecure, never mind trivially insecure, there would be rampant abuse of said vulnerabilities. But there isn’t, which certainly lends credence to Apple’s claims. Apple has been making privacy a major pillar of its product advertisement. Don’t you think that is nothing short of an invitation for security researchers to bang on it long and hard? And yet, still no cracks have been found.

I will say this from an actual security researchers point of view: Apple devices are among the easiest to extract data from. I'm not just talking about iMessage, but the entire contents of the device. This historically hasn't been the case but with research came some pretty novel solutions (ones which have existed for years and Apple has barely bothered to do anything about). I suspect the reason why these "vulnerabilities" haven't been patched by Apple is that the tools required are generally reserved for government agencies, law enforcement, and private firms with enough money to spend. It's not something a kid with a laptop can do, so the impact is fairly low to the general population. Secondly, some of these work arounds can't be patched for a variety of reasons, one being that Apple use it themselves for manufacturing and diagnostics.

[magic]

If you don't want to believe you never will

Meanwhile, here's an actual professional cryptographer discussing this exact flaw. A flaw that literal nobody like me expected to exist, obviously. This may give you an idea of how little prestige there is to earn in "researching" it. And of course Apple themselves would never brag about ability to spy on their customers for obvious reasons.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/08/nicholas_weaver_1.html