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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

Phones today show in the status bar if the camera/microphone is active.

If you can’t trust the software, why would you trust the software? Am I supposed to rely on the hope that an attacker can take over some part of the OS, but not the one rendering a tiny blob in the status bar?

Apple has moved these indicators into their “exclaves” removing any control or influence from the OS / software running.

Source? AFAIK they only have hardware indicators for webcams on cams, and it's not used for microphones.

Different person here, but Apple has tried it multiple times in different ways.

They started in ios14, iOS 17 got new Secure Exclave path that (A18, M4).

Search for “Secure Indicator Light”.

Also searching for “Secure Exclave” will reveal some fun reads.

That’s cool, but on iPhones, there is no indicator LIGHT. Only part of the screen indicates it. And if they can trigger stuff on your phone, maybe a daemon that accidentally covers that part with black also appears, and you wouldn’t notice.

Nope, it interfaces directly with the display driver and overwrites anything from user land or the OS.

That's actually amazing, didn't know that. Do you have an article with some more info on it? Love to read about this stuff.

Here’s an article with further links:

https://9to5mac.com/2024/09/11/iphone-16-privacy-feature-m4-...

I couldn’t find a more technical article but this was when it was released.

I think Snowden worked with someone to create a bulky, apparatus that you could put your iphone into and it would measure if any signals at all were coming from it.

Does that mean the phone will not react to „Hey, Siri“ without a mic icon showing up in the status bar?

“Hey Siri” is activated by the mic, which is always listening, but only for the key phrase. It’s not going through the OS in the traditional sense, hence the “light” only comes on when it starts to listen through the OS.

As an Android user I think there's no way for Google to assist unless directly called upon.

And you think that wouldnt be disabled by malware that can turn your microphone on at will? Lmfao

That seems unlikely, the code to do that would be part of the OS or maybe even part of the hardware, not really trivial things to hack.

Plus, what could a hacker really do with voice recordings that they couldn't do more easily with keylogging? It's not exactly common for people to say their credit card info or passwords aloud, much more common to type it

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