Apple’s T2 security chip jailbreak

This is because I honestly cannot find a laptop with the combination of 64+ GB RAM, a non-NDIVIA GPU (edit: to clarify, this is because of NVIDIA's notoriously bad compatibility with Linux), and other premium hardware aspects like its market-leading trackpad at this time - and I doubt that will change anytime soon.

I live with the debilitating T2 kernel panic hardware bug every week. There's also a very bad graphics bug that I and many others are facing. (Not sure if that one can be avoided by simply using Linux.)

I just want to do away with this T2 chip, and whatever it does to get in the way of an otherwise great Intel-based computing experience. The CPU can handle all my encryption just fine...

Thank you to your team for what you're doing. I assume Apple will constantly patch T2 jailbreaks with future macOS system updates (as that's how firmware is updated), and play a long-term cat and mouse game.

... then phase out your use, because proprietary systems will always get cracked given enough time.

Probably not the best choice :) you never want to use proprietary software if security is a concern

I don't like the walled garden but i still brought a iPhone because iPhones get updates for really long time(3 years minimum). Iphone SE(1st gen) released in 2016 got the iOS14 update.

In the arguments about opening up the iPhone and forcing Apple to allow third party app stores and allow side loading I'm on Apple's side. I think Apple should decide what products they design, how they design them and what features they should have. If I like the feature set, I'll buy the. I do not think it's reasonable for other people to dictate to Apple what code they should write and how it should work, health and safety or deceptive marketing aside. The ability to side load apps would be a software feature that needs to be designed, coded, QA tested, secured etc. Who gets to make all those decisions? I don't think it makes sense to force Apple into doing these things if it doesn't want to do them. You don't like the inability to side load? Buy another phone.

On the other hand once I own a device, it's mine. If I have the ability to jailbreak it, or hack it, or do whatever to it that's my business, not Apple's.

My money is on the second option but AFAIK there's no study like this.

Forgive my ignorance, why is there not much they can do and what have they tried?

Subverting these mechanisms provides a way to prevent the system from making this assertion.

Likewise, the alleged "anti-repair" mechanism for TouchID sensors and TouchBar relate directly to protecting the system's ability to distinguish between the "rightful owner" and a thief.

"Do what I want with the machine I own" is functionally indistinguishable from "increase the resale value of the machine I stole".

You see, I dont disagree. Apple was striving for an ideal that is not achievable. What they are aiming, trying and actually doing are three different thing.

The guarantee of a popular modern 1Tb NVME SSD is you'll at least be able to write 600Tb. I don't know your usage pattern, but those are a lot of write actions.

Remember every component in any electronic device has a finite age: the fan cooling the cpu, keyboards have max. presses, hinges wear out, sockets have a maximum amount of plug/unplug actions.

There's an advantage to soldering on memory, SSD etc: no chance of a bad connector causing problems. The entire class of problems fixed by 'reseating your DIMMS' is gone.

This pretty much kills the whole "intended" security line, the intent is user control.

If apple is a viable root of trust then you yourself should be too. There's nothing magical that only apple can do.

And I think that's actually incredibly underappreciated feature, most people are both bad at memorizing long, complex passwords/passphrases and not all that motivated since the threat is quite abstract. I've had a hard time convincing some people to have any sort of password at all on their laptop (that they travel with, work in all sorts of places and are overall pretty careless with), as it carries the risk of forgetting the password and it's cumbersome and inconvenient compared to being able to simply open the computer to a logged-in desktop.

Making security less of a hassle really does help with adoption. Having a short, relatively weak, but not trivial password is way way better than having none at all, and realistically that's all most people are ever going to have, so making those passwords hold up better is a really smart move that instantly ups the security of lots and lots of people out there.

But that's not something I believe you could do without a scheme like tieing the encrypted data to a complex secret inside a specific T2 that is uncracked, otherwise you could simply put the SSD in another computer and brute-force it there.

Theft will happen anyway. You can even sell permanently-locked/bricked devices to people which doesn't look to closely at the sellers description. Sure you will need to sell them for cheap, but that's all.

That idea is like saying all cars must be always tracked, always link up with the drivers phone and be remote-controllable by there manufacturer to prevent theft.

Sure it would prevent theft, maybe, until people find ways to brake it. But it's still totally unreasonable with a lot of hidden cost to it.

E.g. in case of apple laptops the cost is losing a lot of small independent companies as well as any way to properly repair an Apple laptop. (Apple doe NOT provide proper repairs they at best replace whole components often the whole main board because it's one component when many damages tend to be similar because people use their devices similar and often are reasonable fixable with a bit of not-easy-but-not-very-hard-either soldering).

EDIT: And most important! The theft constraint can be archived to a reasonable degree WITHOUT locking out third party repair. A example (through not applicable to mac in this case) is how I setup my laptop with a custom EFI platform key/certificate and a BIOS password so to reuse it after theft people have to replace the BIOS chip soldered onto the motherboard (it has no publicly known master key or reset pin). Apple can archive similar things so that theft is more costy but third party repairs are still mostly unconstrained.

That said, from the EU directive:

> Member States shall take appropriate measures to ensure that rightholders make available to the beneficiary of an exception or limitation provided for in national law in accordance with Article 5(2)(a), (2)(c), (2)(d), (2)(e), (3)(a), (3)(b) or (3)(e) the means of benefiting from that exception or limitation, to the extent necessary to benefit from that exception or limitation and where that beneficiary has legal access to the protected work or subject-matter concerned.

There are certain exceptions, in articles 1, 2, 3 and 4, which can be read at https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL.... So there's not a blanket right to circumvent DRM; and nothing is spelt out that clearly.

Additionally, not a lawyer or in Government, however, in my lay-mans reading of this directive, I'm seeing a lot of usages of the word "may". I'm (possibly incorrectly) interpreting this as meaning a Member State can introduce these copyright exceptions, not that it's mandated as the FSFE article states.

And as I understand it, it's also the Secure Enclave that enforces the attempt limits.