[noasaservice]

Oh please.

Scary high-end governmental supply chain backdooring with chips the size of a grain of rice are for fiction rags like Bloomberg:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

Techniques like this; tying hardware together and not allowing legitimate owners pair them to work is purely anti-competitive garbage. We've seen this with coffee pods, automated cat litterbox cleaners, dish washers, inkjet printers, and more.

Apple finally wanted the market for themselves. And since they control the hardware, well, yeah.

[aurizon]

You are wrong. With a state actor in the room, it is quite possible to place a complex die with static ram on a thin substrate inside a multilayer board, using the +5 and ground and a number of traces that lead to I/O ports etc, https://hackaday.com/2019/01/18/oreo-construction-hiding-you... Remember these are all from 15 down to 10 nanometer parts and at that size circuit complexity takes little space and since they live beneath other chips, they are hard to find with x-rays if there is a +5 and ground plane that hides them. Remember are 16 billion gates in an Apple M1 CPU, https://www.macrumors.com/guide/m1/#:~:text=M1%20Macs%20max%.... A million gate parts is as small as a poppy seed and would need to have a fan out - perhaps they could have an optical I/O and live within the corporate data stream, only waking up when special complex command sequences occur and they read their RAM and do their job - back to waiting...

[dpkonofa]

What a straw man! Coffee pods, automated litterboxes, dish washers, and all the rest don't carry an individual's entire digital life on them. You're literally comparing devices that really don't need any kind of security (other than, at worst, network security) to devices that demand privacy and security.

This is either a disingenuous attempt to downplay the important of hardware security or an extremely ignorant analysis of the situation being described.

[noasaservice]

> This is either a disingenuous attempt to downplay the important of hardware security or an extremely ignorant analysis of the situation being described.

All of those examples have to do with one primary concept: DRM.

DRM doesn't serve the end user. Nor does the coffee pods with Keurig, all the stupid stuff around inkjet cartridges, cat litterbox cleaner, and more. They ALL do have to do with customer capture and profit enforcement.

[dpkonofa]

The parent comment wasn't talking about simple DRM. They were making a specific point that Apple's motivation for hardening the hardware security of phones had nothing to do with actual security but was "anti-competitive garbage" and then compared it to devices that don't need security. It's not the same thing.

I agree that all those things have needless DRM but that doesn't support or prove the parent's point at all.

[noasaservice]

It is not my responsibility to disprove that replacing the screen is some sort of anti-nation-state thing. It's their job to prove that.

The obvious and most direct answer is this is being used to prevent repair by all the phone repair companies that have popped up. They now want a cut, and have enforced a serial-number-on-a-chip that kills a whole industry.

[dpkonofa]

That's not how it works. You're the one making the claim, you have to show the evidence to support that claim. They have only claimed that their intention in doing this is to improve security on these devices and they've literally published white papers showing how this does that. There's an entire white paper dedicated to the Secure Enclave and another dedicated just to FaceID.

There's no obvious and direct answer here because you haven't challenged their claim or their evidence that doing this makes these devices more secure because it does. It may have the additional side-effect of making repairs more difficult but if you want to make the claim that their motivation is not what they say it is then you have to provide the evidence for that.