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> The NSA has probably already forced Apple to hand the keys over to them. Again, that's not how it works. There's no set of keys and certificates they could

> The NSA has probably already forced Apple to hand the keys over to them. Again, that's not how it works. There's no set of keys and certificates they could give to the NSA. Every iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max has a unique set of cryptographic keys, most of which can't be accessed by Apple. The first thing that happens is when photo sensor is initialized at the factory, it creates its own ECDSA P-256 signing key pair; the private key is never disclosed. The public key is signed by the factory's certificate authority. This ain't X.509 where VeriSign's key pair is sitting in a HSM at their HQ and in theory could be forced to sign a fraudulent certificate or revoke someone's valid website certificate.

microtonal 9d ago
They don’t need the signing keys though. Apple could roll out a separate version of sepOS to assist law enforcement that signs at they will. Also, while the unique device ID is supposed to be burned into fuses by the SE during production, it is kinda hard to prove for anyone that is not Apple that this indeed happens in the way they state. Personally I’m not a strong believer in such theories though. I think it’s more mundane and Apple helps law enforcement by having some weak defaults. Like how iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but most chats are available to law enforcement because most people turn on iCloud Backups/Messages in iCloud and not ADP, resulting in chats only being encrypted at-rest in iCloud. This is only stated somewhere in a footnote in one of their security documents. There are more weak defaults like that in various crucial apps (e.g. WhatsApp) that makes most important stuff available to law enforcement when needed.