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Comment by stalfosknight | Hacker News Reader

Intel's spyware is one big reason I look forward to switching to Apple Silicon soon.

I am not an expert in Apple hardware / firmware, but I admire your trust that the US government could not exert the same influence on Apple as they did on Intel.

Intel probably had to disclose the existence of IME due to collaboration with mainboard vendors. Apple does not face this constraint, so it is a lot easier for them to keep such subsystems under wraps.

Of course I'm just speculating here, but a product typically mirrors its environment.

The IME was never a secret. Anyone can decap an Intel chip and point to it.

I find it implausible that the A/M series chips have an independent subsystem that is so obfuscated that the expert attention which each Apple die receives has turned up no trace of it.

The company has its own approach to secure compute with the T2 modules, but no, I don't believe Apple would be able to hide something like IME on their CPUs without it being detected as such.

Which is to say, it's hiding in plain sight. The secure enclave and T2 modules can do things to the processor. Who's to say "things" doesn't include ME-like capabilities?

The people who reverse-engineered the secure enclave firmware can say that.

It might be useful to go over Wikipedia's entry for both platforms, here's the IME:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

And this for the T2:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_T2

Neither of these are obscure products, they are of great interest to reversers and other security researchers. The list of shady things IME does which the T2 isn't known to is extensive.

“Anyone can decap a chip” made me laugh. I am curious how many people can do that and then understand what is going on.

The point is that the answer is "everyone who needs to be able to".

The number of expert and curious people, with the means, is higher than the number of new chip types Apple or Intel produces. There's always a detailed die photo available within the first few weeks of a product launching.

I see your point and agree. Anyway, I am already using “anyone can decap a chip” for the listeners' amusement in my daily conversations.

In recent decades it has become much harder in most countries to get access to the red fuming nitric acid necessary to decap epoxy-encapsulated chips; it's considered a "drug precursor" and/or "explosives precursor". I hear that a few years ago someone figured out that boiling the chip in colophony for a few hours also works? At the boiling point of the colophony, that is, not water. I haven't tried it myself.

Couldn't the T2 chip (or other Apple security chips) do similar things?

Isn't T2 there because apple didn't trust intel me at all?

There is no one trust about this sh*t except intel themselves.

The only difference is apple have the power to ask intel get rid of it but we don't.

> There is no one trust about this sh*t except intel themselves.

AMD has this also, they appeared around the same time, and there is no reason to believe (if) this was outside of their control (i.e. mandated) that Apple isn't also playing ball here.

Trusting Apple...doesn't make a lot of sense. They're almost entirely security-by-obscurity. You have nothing to go on but their promises.

Apple doesn't tell us everything, but they do say a lot so I don't think I'd call it security by obscurity.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-enclave-sec5...

https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...

They give us the architecture diagrams and tell us how the locks on their doors work, but they don't gives us the keys for it.

Remember: You don't actually own any iOS device because you can't run unsigned code that you wrote on it.

If the builds aren't verifiable and you can't put what you want on there then it's just promises, which are worth nothing.

> Remember: You don't actually own any iOS device because you can't run unsigned code that you wrote on it.

We agree about that!

I'm with you on the general idea that we shouldn't blindly believe everything a for-profit corporation says but at the same time we shouldn't allow fact-free speculation, rumor, or just plain cynicism to masquerade as facts either.

I don't think it's controversial that trust in Apple's extremely locked-down ecosystem basically comes down to "we promise". If it's closed source you can't verify. Even if it's open, if it's not a reproducible build (or your own build) that you install yourself then who knows what's on there and what it does?

Oh, the irony... Remember the hardwired 'Find My' geolocation function built into the permanently-on T2 chip?

You believe there are not non-architectural cores in Macs?

Do you have evidence otherwise?

Yeah, I do. Every system has tons of non-architectural cores for security, power management, and for other purposes. Apple advertises some of theirs as for example "secure enclave" and, on older Macs, the T1 and T2 security processor which runs the proprietary closed-source BridgeOS and has unfettered access to everything on the system.

Which one of these cores perform the same functions and present the same attack surface as the IME?

Closed source, so we can speculate (or try to reverse engineer/break it).

So at best we have cynicism / paranoia regarding Apple's T2.

That's all anyone has against IME, also. And BridgeOS isn't any more secure. There are tons of known flaws in it.

Part of it runs bridgeOS. The Secure Enclave runs something else altogether called sepOS.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/secure-enclave-sec5...

By a 'zero trust' security philosophy, anything short of completely open source is inherently untrustable.

You may not be practicing that philosophy, but that doesn't make those who do "paranoid" any more than corporations implementing PCI-DSS controls.

Security does not work retroactively, only proactively.

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