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I strongly disagree that there is no evidence that Lockdown mode is effective; there have been numerous exposed, active iOS exploitation campaigns of which none have worked against Lockdown mode. When we're trying to prove a negative, that's actually some of the strongest evidence we can get.

The economics of the device exploitation industry are completely orthogonal from bug bounty payouts; the markets only overlap at the _extreme_ fringes. Trying to use one as a proxy for the other is meaningless.

I don't necessarily disagree but a lot of chains will bail out if they find like the Norton Antivirus app on your phone so

In this case the body of evidence is still quite powerful though, given that not only do we not have any forensic evidence of compromise from a phone with Lockdown Mode, but in all public cases where chains were RE'd back out of the forensic evidence, they don't work when tested on Lockdown Mode! So, there's even signal that the lack of forensics indicating Lockdown Mode compromises is not due to artificial targeting or detonation gates, but rather successful mitigation.

(as an aside): I'm not trying to say Lockdown Mode is infallible; I am sure phones in Lockdown Mode are or will be compromised. But it's clearly a very powerful tool, and to try to argue that it is some kind of marketing-driven conspiracy, against the body of evidence of its success, using bug bounty payout numbers (???), as the grandparent post did, is ridiculous.

I wouldn't say that it's useless but I do want to consider the option that the chains that get caught are probably the ones that are less competent.

That is a total strawman. The standard of “effective” being used by the person I was responding to and Apple themselves is “protects against state actors targeting you”, not “has any benefit whatsoever” or even “has a material benefit”.

Protecting against state actors is not a instantaneous property of the present. It demands durable protection against compromise by state actors who can easily spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on teams of hundreds for multiple years to develop novel, durable exploits known only to them. To the extent that compromises exist, they would require expected resource expenditure in excess of what state actors can deploy or are in excess of the value derivable by state actors which is going to be in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollar range to constitute as being "effective against state actors targeting you".

Protecting against state actors means secure against Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and the NSA. That is the unsupported marketing bullshit I am calling out.

Apple is almost certainly spending hundreds of millions if not billions on software security.

Sure, but that is not related to anything I said.

I said that “protects against state actors” means the cost of finding a exploit as generally applicable and powerful as a zero-click RCE needs to cost on the order of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per exploit to be problematic for state actors to field.

That amount of resources is a competent team of 100 skilled individuals finding zero zero-click RCEs after 3 years of full time investigation. That could credibly be called secure against state actors, though would still not be out of reach of a real military operation as a hundred million dollars is still just the cost of a single jet fighter.

> We have seen multiple software hacks resulting in >10 million dollar payouts

This sets a nice price bar for exploitation. Is someone willing to pay 10+ million dollars to get access to your phone?

The obvious caveat here is that for a lot less than 10 million dollars someone can be hired to hit you with a metal pipe until you give up your passcode.

> click total compromise that can trivially worm to take down hundreds of millions of iPhones simultaneously

Where is the profit motive in doing this? Possibility is one thing, but a realistic threat is another.

Is someone willing to pay 10+ million dollars to get access to your phone?

Not yours specifically usually, but there is a lot of money in a general tool that law enforcement can use to read out phones. Of course, most of them focus on physical access. In the few Cellebrite reports/presentations that have leaked, iPhones would fall after a relatively short time (IIRC a few months), but did better than most Android phones (except GrapheneOS).

Also, sometimes you do not need the 10M exploit, you can buy many cheaper exploits and make a chain yourself.

The obvious caveat here is that for a lot less than 10 million dollars someone can be hired to hit you with a metal pipe until you give up your passcode

If they hit you with a metal pipe, it's likely that you won't survive even if you give up your passcode. So most likely you are protecting something or someone else. Set up a duress PIN so that you have options in that case.

... really? Zero-click RCEs can be used on arbitrarily many phones until they are discovered which usually takes on the order of months. You do not need to burn them on every individual target.

As a example of how they might be used in that fashion for profit, NSO group had a revenue of 240 million dollars in 2020. Many of their customers were governments who wanted to spy on activists and journalists. NSO group was in the business of economies of scale to democratize access to journalist devices by reusing a small stockpile of exploits across many targets with enough revenue to assure a steady stream of new exploits as fast as they were burned.

You’re right, I misstated. It’s not 10 million per exploitation, it instead limits the pool of people who can exploit you to those willing and have the ability to spend 10 million+ on an exploit.

That is still quite a small pool, and there are other network effects preventing any Joe blogs with that much capital from launching an exploitation campaign.

Again, no. You do not need to spend 10 million on a exploit if you are working with a company like NSO Group who sells white-glove access to target individual as a service. The cost lower bound is going to be on the order of ((cost of exploit) / (number of times exploit can be used)) and the denominator there is going to easily be in the hundreds to thousands. Of course prices are likely to be higher than the minimum due to profit margins.

To, once again, use the same example of NSO Group as it is infamous and well-documented [1]. In 2016 it was 500,000 $ upfront and 650,000 $/year for 10 devices. That article claims Saudi Arabia was monitoring 15,000 phones at a average cost of 10,000 $/phone. In [2] it was 7 million $ for 15 devices, but the upfront versus marginal cost per device is not broken down. And this was a relatively "above-board" company in the sense that they were a legitimate business entity with government deals which commands a premium relative to random unknown blackhat organization with no reputation.

And again, my original comment was discussing commercial profit-motivated attackers for which 1 million $ is easily within reach and just a cost of doing business to unlock greater amounts of profit. That is less than the cost of setting up a McDonalds. There is a vast, vast gap spanning factors of millions between Joe Schmo and commercial actors and a even vaster gap to state actors. There is no evidence that Lockdown mode is adequate against even commercial actors, let alone the vastly more capable state actors.

[1] https://prodefence.io/news/pegasus-spyware-operating-costs-c...

[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/meta-suit-aga...

No root and no way to firewall them. "Lockdown" mode - a lot of inconveniences.