The NSA has probably already forced Apple to hand the keys over to them.
We already know it's happening right now, and they know we know, but we can't do shit about it.
I'm aware. The point is they can't give the NSA something they don't have. The photo sensor generates its own ECDSA P-256 signing key pair and never releases the private half.
Every device has a unique key pair and the private key is unavailable… there's not a way to give the NSA that would help them. The system is setup so that the image data, meta data, etc can't be accessed by anyone including Apple.
(Similar to how many PGP hardware keys allow generating a private key on-device or writing your own provided key.)
- verifies each link and its certificate chain, sensor signature over pixels, SEP signature, device manifest signature
- PCC Submits the commitment (the JPEG hash) to Apple's signing service.
So, at some point in time, Apple's servers have both the original certificate chain and the new replacement signature. If this is recorded, Apple can deanonimize photos and check whether two photos were from the same device/sensor.
Apple's system protects against most state actors, except Apple and the US, unless you fully trust that their PCC is watertight.
(Remember that Apple was part of PRISM and probably also its successor.)
I don't think law enforcement needs it, because when sending/posting a picture, people leak so much metadata anyway.
But people outside the US should certainly distrust these systems.
Again, that's not how it works.
There's no set of keys and certificates they could give to the NSA. Every iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max has a unique set of cryptographic keys, most of which can't be accessed by Apple.
The first thing that happens is when photo sensor is initialized at the factory, it creates its own ECDSA P-256 signing key pair; the private key is never disclosed. The public key is signed by the factory's certificate authority.
This ain't X.509 where VeriSign's key pair is sitting in a HSM at their HQ and in theory could be forced to sign a fraudulent certificate or revoke someone's valid website certificate.
Also, while the unique device ID is supposed to be burned into fuses by the SE during production, it is kinda hard to prove for anyone that is not Apple that this indeed happens in the way they state.
Personally I’m not a strong believer in such theories though. I think it’s more mundane and Apple helps law enforcement by having some weak defaults. Like how iMessage is end-to-end encrypted, but most chats are available to law enforcement because most people turn on iCloud Backups/Messages in iCloud and not ADP, resulting in chats only being encrypted at-rest in iCloud. This is only stated somewhere in a footnote in one of their security documents.
There are more weak defaults like that in various crucial apps (e.g. WhatsApp) that makes most important stuff available to law enforcement when needed.