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iOS 10 Security White Paper [pdf]
- camdenlock 10y agoThis is one of the reasons why Apple is still great. Their designs are thoughtful and deeply-considered. They may disappear up their own asses with a fair amount of regularity, but that doesn't stop them from excelling in certain areas (such as, indeed, privacy and security).
- bjelkeman-again 10y agoIt is sad that something like the iCloud Keychain is so poorly implemented across the different devices.
- alphabettsy 10y agoHow so? You mean from user access and usability standpoint? I know I certainly wish there was a Keychain access app like on macOS available for iOS rather than only being able to access passwords via Safari settings.
- comex 10y agoProbably referring to the key distribution process, where to enable iCloud Keychain you have to approve from another device. It's a sound design in theory - the keys are only stored locally, so even Apple can't access them - but I've personally experienced issues several times where the approval notification wouldn't show up on my other devices, or the UI was in an inconsistent state, etc.
- haikuginger 10y agoIt's true- I think one of Apple's main stumbling points lately has been failing to consider the user experience in cases where, for example, a good Internet connection isn't available, or a particular piece of data has an unexpected attribute.
- bjelkeman-again 10y agoThanks for saying what I should have said. I have devices that refuse to apparently sync the keychain. One device has the right key for something but the other does not, and there is no indication of why.
- Lukasa 10y agoIt's worth noting that the iOS and macOS keychains are very different. In fact, if you check the design docs you'll find they share only four functions between them. Essentially, as far as I could tell, the iOS keychain participates in the sandboxing of apps, while the macOS one does not.
- shalmanese 10y agoAnd stuff like accessibility and environmental sustainability. There's a bunch of areas which only matter a lot to a small group of people where, when you investigate it, Apple has quietly been doing the right thing for a long time.
- CalChris 10y agoIts previous edition was required reading for CS 161 at Berkeley. Would that it were required reading in Mountain View. http://www-inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/fa16/ http://www-inst.cs.berkeley.edu/~cs161/fa16/ (Yeah, it says optional on the syllabus but Weaver said required in lecture.)
- AsyncAwait 10y agoDo they don't know/care about security, or is it simply the case that it is hard to have something like the secure enclave across all Android devices? Genuine question.
- enraged_camel 10y agoIt's probably a little bit of both - they don't care as much when it comes to Android (since Android's "open" nature is one of its primary selling points) and they also don't control the entire supply chain like Apple does. The latter is important: at the end of the day, software can only be as secure as the hardware on which it is installed. For example if someone can tamper with the hardware random number generator then your crypto becomes compromised.
- CalChris 10y agoYes, IMHO they know. Their Chrome security model was required reading in CS 261. https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~raluca/cs261-f15/ https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~raluca/cs261-f15/ But to me, they seem to be trying to find a moderate level of security with a profitable cost of goods. It doesn't seem that their heart is in it the way Apple's is with the Enclave. iOS is still breakable at the nation state level but well that's quite a high bar. Nation states are breakable at the nation state level.
- alexpersian 10y agoDo you have a source on the "breakable at the nation state level"? Last I heard they've only been able to compromise models before the 6.
- gwu78 10y agohttp://www.cultofmac.com/280189/icloud-hacker-calls-apples-response-little-late/ http://www.cultofmac.com/280189/icloud-hacker-calls-apples-r... http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/apple-warned-icloud-vulnerability-months-4326913 http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technology-science/technology/a...
- IBM 10y ago"There have not been any breaches in any of Apple’s systems including iCloud and Apple ID," the spokesperson said. "The alleged list of email addresses and passwords appears to have been obtained from previously compromised third-party services." http://fortune.com/2017/03/22/apple-iphone-hacker-ransom/ http://fortune.com/2017/03/22/apple-iphone-hacker-ransom/
- tedunangst 10y agoThis was a better comment before you "improved" it with the CVE count baloney.
- zaytoun 10y agoI really do respect Apple's attention to security and privacy, however I was a little disappointed when I came across an Apple ID leak from their login form [0] last week. They patched a fix a couple days after I reported it, but still haven't responded to my initial report. It's quite concerning given how easy this simple flaw could have been used for malicious purposes to potentially collect millions of Apple ID's. [0] https://github.com/zaytoun/Apple-ID-Data-Leak https://github.com/zaytoun/Apple-ID-Data-Leak
- chatmasta 10y agoThat looks like extremely irresponsible disclosure? Publishing to GitHub and then "edit: I contacted apple" ????
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sillysaurus3 10y agoThere's nothing wrong with disclosing a security bug immediately. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:tptacek%20responsible%20disclosure%20&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?query=author:tptacek%20responsible%2...
- SamReidHughes 10y agoA list of Apple ID's isn't exactly a big deal. I've got mine listed in my HN profile.
- dcdevito 10y agoAnyone here on an Android phone ever been hacked? Yeah I didn't think so. This is just more Apple propaganda
- Nuance 10y ago"Propaganda" LOL.
- urda 10y ago> Anyone here on an Android phone ever been hacked? You must be new, but here's some resources I suggest you review before you go on a crusade in future Apple articles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagefright_(bug) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stagefright_(bug) https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/06/godless-apps-some-found-in-google-play-root-90-of-android-phones/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/06/godless-apps-some-f... https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/10/android-phones-rooted-by-most-serious-linux-escalation-bug-ever/ https://arstechnica.com/security/2016/10/android-phones-root... http://blog.elevenpaths.com/2016/07/another-month-another-new-rooting.html http://blog.elevenpaths.com/2016/07/another-month-another-ne... Also, keep your bait to other sites like reddit, we don't stand for it here on HN.
- dcdevito 10y agoAnyone who knows how to use a smartphone properly simply won't have security problems to deal with. What difference does any of this make with iOS when we all know the US Gov't can simply access backdoors whenever they please? Don't fall for this security meme. What does any of this matter when iCloud is a hacker's dream?? And I didn't ask if HN readers' phones CAN be hacked, I simply asked if they WERE asked. F off Elitist troll.
- dang 10y agoWe've banned this account for violating the site guidelines.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoI suggest you read the Android Security 2016 Year in Review before posting any further links to blog sites whose primary goal is to post scaremongering articles for click bait. According to Adrian Ludwig there has not been one known successful StageFright exploit in the wild. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/source.android.com/en//security/reports/Google_Android_Security_2016_Report_Final.pdf https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/source.android.co...
- qrbLPHiKpiux 10y agoTheir LEO guide is just as good, but not updated in a while.
- zsmizzle 10y agoLink?
- floatboth 10y agoThis is really cool: > Securely erasing saved keys is just as important as generating them. It’s especially challenging to do so on flash storage, where wear-leveling might mean multiple copies of data need to be erased. To address this issue, iOS devices include a feature dedicated to secure data erasure called Effaceable Storage. This feature accesses the underlying storage technology (for example, NAND) to directly address and erase a small number of blocks at a very low level. I guess that means separate storage, as the main storage in recent iPhones is an NVMe SSD and not raw NAND attached to the processor. BTW, is there a good / easy way to connect raw NAND to a normal desktop PC?
- bryanbuckley 10y agoIt's cool but note that you would never be saving secrets in cleartext to disk.
- pkaye 10y agoWhat purpose do you want to access raw NAND? If you are okay with just a basic low speed connection to read the NAND, there is a fairly standardized async protocol which you could achieve with a dozen GPIO pins. You could also use a FPGA or and NAND flash programmer (like of like the old EPROM programmers) However beyond this, you need to know a bit more information to interpret this raw data. This includes any data framing structure, error correction, scrambling, encryption and read error recovery algorithms. A lot of this information is non-standard or only available under NDA from the manufacturer.
- floatboth 10y agoI just want it to show up in the OS as MTD so e.g. I could use it with JFFS2 like OpenWrt does on routers. But on a desktop PC.
- pkaye 10y agoIn that case, I'm not familiar of any practical way to to interface to the NAND flash except that which comes with some embedded controllers boards. But let me add that even if you interface to the NAND, you still need to solve some of the things I mentioned above if the NAND is any technology node below 20nm or so. If you don't do it right, even with decent error correction you will get a high bit error rate.
- dguido 10y ago@computerality extracted the sections that changed between the iOS 9 and 10 security white papers here: https://gist.github.com/computerality/3e0bc104cd216bf0f03f8d3aa8fbf081 https://gist.github.com/computerality/3e0bc104cd216bf0f03f8d... <--- only the new parts tl;dr: https://twitter.com/computerality/status/844652877058625536 https://twitter.com/computerality/status/844652877058625536 https://twitter.com/computerality/status/844654500141060096 https://twitter.com/computerality/status/844654500141060096 https://twitter.com/computerality/status/844655868377550848 https://twitter.com/computerality/status/844655868377550848
- wikibob 10y agoAnd here's a direct link to the computerality diff in plain text for easy viewing on mobile: https://gist.githubusercontent.com/computerality/3e0bc104cd216bf0f03f8d3aa8fbf081/raw/31b8ebf1cbe6b716e0eb51ad1b1fbb403d18f2e9/gistfile1.txt https://gist.githubusercontent.com/computerality/3e0bc104cd2...
- Animats 10y agoWhat's lacking is a requirement that Apple Store apps must cooperate with user privacy settings. If the user denies an app access to location services, contacts, or calendars, Apple should require that the app still run. For example, if the user denies the Uber app location information when the app is not being used, Uber car ordering should still work. Apps should not be allowed to demand access they do not need to serve the user.
- myowncrapulence 10y agoUse a service that respects that then. Lyft.
- djrogers 10y agoYou picked a bad example, as Uber car ordering does work with location services disabled. Any better examples come to mind of apps that refuse to run unless hey have an unreasonable feature granted?
- dmerrick 10y agoPerhaps this has changed recently, but the last time I tried to use Uber without "allow location access even when not using the app," I was unable to call a ride. Instead, I was given instructions on how to enable that setting.
- djrogers 10y agoI've used it constantly without location services since the day they first requested the feature. When I open it, the splash screen has 2 options - Enable Location Services and Enter Pickup Address. Perhaps you missed the second option?
- tonyztan 10y agoOn Android, GM's Maven car-sharing app (similar to ZipCar) does not run unless all permissions are granted, which include the ability to manage phone calls. The Chinese WeChat messenger also refuses to run unless location access is granted, even though messaging apps do not depend on location to work. This type of behavior makes fine-grained permissions systems not very useful. It should be prohibited by the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
- locacorten 10y agoMicrosoft's paper: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/msr-tr-2015-84.pdf https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
- tra3 10y agoSlightly offtopic, that cant be a wordpress instance can it? I've only seen `wp-content` paths on wordpress blogs...
- culturestate 10y agoYep, it's WordPress: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-login.php https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-login.php
- chuckdries 10y agowordpress is popular man
- tra3 10y agoAmazing. Microsoft running wordpress on the main corporate site.
- tmsldd 10y agoIs there any similar document about macOS ?
- archvile 10y agoThe only one I could find provided from Apple applies to 10.6 Snow Leopard. Strange there isn't a similar security guide for Mac OS like they have for iOS.
- rimliu 10y agoThere is also this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLGFriOKz6U
- khana 10y ago"Security architecture diagram of iOS provides a visual overview of the different technologies discussed in this document." as opposed to what I'd expect: 'Security architecture diagram of iOS provides a visual overview of the different technologies IN AN IPHONE.'
- Esau 10y agoDid they never release an iOS 10 security paper before now? I'm asking because iOS 10 has been out for a while and iOS 11 is just around the corner.