The "magic software" is, at its core, just strong encryption and an unbroken chain of trust. You trust your OS updates because your machine trusts the certific

The "magic software" is, at its core, just strong encryption and an unbroken chain of trust. You trust your OS updates because your machine trusts the certificate it is presented with. Your machine trusts that certificate because it is signed by an authority which is in your machine's local list of trusted authorities. If people mess up that list of trusted certificate authorities, it can easily compromise the system. Remember this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfish#Lenovo_security_inci... Now imagine if, instead of having an identifiable certificate authority which accidentally allowed third parties to intercept and modify your encrypted traffic, that were an undetectable feature of the encryption algorithm. If that were the case, no matter how much you trusted the entity that understands the nature of the backdoor, you would not trust your OS.