Kaspersky finds hardware backdoor in 5 generations of Apple Silicon (2024)

Thread at the time <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38783112">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38783112</a>

This is a year old, does anyone have an article with updates?

Anyone who is paranoid about hardware backdoors might enjoy this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu&#x2F;~somlo&#x2F;BTCP&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu&#x2F;~somlo&#x2F;BTCP&#x2F;</a>

I read the original Kaspersky analysis and found it very weird that such a cyber security company that works with the Russian government closely allows US made phones accessing their networks as late as 2023 Dec.

According to this blog it has been patched. But it really does open up the question of how much do we trust Apple, Google and other large tech companies.

I always assumed, not having worked at Apple, but from the observed functionality and the fact that they could patch it, that this was a debug backdoor that didn&#x27;t get killswitched before release builds and then they decided it would draw attention to it if they killed it after the fact.

Smells like CIA stuff. Impressive.

You have to wonder if the only reason the iPhone 16 isn’t included in this article, is because the article was written before the iPhone 16 existed.

I wonder if something like this is behind the push from Microsoft to obsolete a lot of hardware with the windows 11 release. The NSA pushed them to require a hardware upgrade so people replace devices bearing old processors with new ones featuring the latest bleeding-edge backdoors.

Wow, this is terrible.