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I suppose this is the only way to definitively stop any three-letter agencies from asking you to backdoor your kernel.
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The spokesperson is talking out of their ass regarding performance. The kernel is decrypted by iBoot once at boot, using the hardware AES engine. It remains decrypted until the device is shutdown/rebooted. Decompressing and decrypting the kernel takes less than a second at boot. Also, TechCrunch fails to note that the kernelcache keys for most 32-bit kernels (and all iOS versions) are publicly available. Private indi…
> The spokesperson is talking out of their ass regarding performance. I'm fairly certain that this statement was vetted by Craig Federighi himself or, at minimum, a high-level engineering manager.
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The OS X and iOS kernel are descendants of the nextStep kernel which is open source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
Right, but how much code does the last open-source xnu have in common with the latest?
Apple has also shifted to pushing a lot of sensitive/proprietary code into kernel extensions (the new Apple File System being one example), for which they don't release source code (generally speaking).
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Or perhaps the three-letter-agencies demanded they do such a backdoor (i.e. a deliberate but obscure security hole), so they are open-sourcing it so hackers can find it.
Nitpick: they are not open-sourcing it; they are just leaving the compiled binary unencrypted.
I suppose this is the only way to definitively stop any three-letter agencies from asking you to backdoor your kernel.
Also, all you need is one insider kernel developer to get all the source code anyways. I always find these kinds of initiatives silly -- A lot of companies think that an insider is a side-channel attack when really it's the main vector.
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Nitpick: they are not open-sourcing it; they are just leaving the compiled binary unencrypted.
I get down voted for sharing some knowledge. What is the point of even posting?
Although I'm guessing the whole segment is loaded into ram and verified by the bootloader at boot then never touched again.
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Nitpick: they are not open-sourcing it; they are just leaving the compiled binary unencrypted.
The OS X and iOS kernel are descendants of the nextStep kernel which is open source. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
Also, even on OS X, it takes a while after new versions of the OS are released for new kernel source bundles to drop. So sometimes poking around with IDA is your only recourse.