| [Disclaimer: I worked in Apple Red Team] What if this isn’t a good news for 99% of Apple users? That’s obviously an amazing measure for the 1% high targets out there. But what about the other 99%? Does that create an incentive for Apple to strengthen Lockdown Mode security to the detriment of the regular mode (should we call it Unsafe Mode)? I’m afraid that this architecture will make it harder to prioritize security features or fixes for the 99% users. Developers bandwidth is limited, they can’t fix all bugs. Hence if you have to choose between one bug impacting the 1% most important users (from a security standpoint) versus one bug impacting the 99% others, which would you choose? Would such an architecture have led to the emergence of Blastdoor[1] - which attempts at mitigating iMessage attachement exploits, but is now useless in Lockdown mode? My hope here is that by reducing attack surface, Lockdown mode will make exploits much easier to fix (as they’ll target a limited area), allowing to strengthen the system core while freeing bandwidth to implement longer term, Blastdoor like mitigations. [1] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-look-at-ime... |