21–30 of 52 posts
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> e.g., AES_CMD_USE_GID Sometimes people mix up “i.e.” (“id est”; “that is”) and “e.g.” (“exempli gratia”; “for example”). Of course, only the author knows if this case was a mix up, or if they really wrote what they meant.
For anyone looking for a more memorable mnemonic, learned them as "I explain" and "example given".
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I smell AI writing assistance. Which is a shame because this is otherwise very good and well-collated information about Apple's security. But AI loves to use bullet point lists just for the hell of it and it makes the information here smell way less reliable than it actually is. I'm also not sure if it's 100% accurate. My (possibly wrong) understanding of the guarded execution feature is that each GL is paired with a…
I think the article is being stealth edited which is a bit annoying; its explanation of guarded execution is now closer to yours, which I think is accurate.
Will this enable someone who buys an apple laptop to boot directly into a third-party OS, from a thumb drive? Last I heard, they were still too locked down to allow it.
Will this enable someone who buys an apple laptop to boot directly into a third-party OS, from a thumb drive? Last I heard, they were still too locked down to allow it.
Will this enable someone who buys an apple laptop to boot directly into a third-party OS, from a thumb drive? Last I heard, they were still too locked down to allow it.
Apple Silicon doesn't support UEFI, so no.
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There's many factual errors in this AI slop. For example, it says quite unambiguously that the bootloader is encrypted directly with the GID key (loading the LLB ciphertext into the AES engine), but that's not how it works, the GID key is used to decrypt the LLB's KBAG into an AES key:IV pair and that is used to decrypt the LLB. More: > The behavior of the Boot ROM changes fundamentally based on the "Security Domain"…
All of these errors have now been stealth-corrected. New strategy discovered: Ask LLM to write article, nerdsnipe HN into correcting it, feed corrections back into LLM until people stop complaining
I suspected LLM rewriting or generation but I don't possess enough knowledge into how the Apple pre-boot environment works to make an accurate judgement on the accuracy of the post. But I definitely had very strong suspicions of LLM influence with all the bullet lists and hem-hawing the post does; I would expect that someone who successfully reverse engineered the boot chain this thoroughly wouldn't need to hedge anything but Apple's rationale on why they did things. But maybe I'm too overly focused on details.
This is a really interesting deep dive but why does the article hedge so much? For example, in the first few sections it says things like "... typically reveals the following sequence" or "The Boot ROM sets a specific control bit in the AES configuration register (e.g., AES_CMD_USE_GID)", which makes it sound like the author wasn't actually sure if any of this was accurate and was guessing.
This is a really interesting deep dive but why does the article hedge so much? For example, in the first few sections it says things like "... typically reveals the following sequence" or "The Boot ROM sets a specific control bit in the AES configuration register (e.g., AES_CMD_USE_GID)", which makes it sound like the author wasn't actually sure if any of this was accurate and was guessing.
I smell AI writing assistance. Which is a shame because this is otherwise very good and well-collated information about Apple's security. But AI loves to use bullet point lists just for the hell of it and it makes the information here smell way less reliable than it actually is. I'm also not sure if it's 100% accurate. My (possibly wrong) understanding of the guarded execution feature is that each GL is paired with a…
I have met multiple brilliant, very bright, and talented people (mathematicians, physicists, doctors) who excel at what they know and do, yet immensely struggle to spell, write, or both. There are also people who do not like to write (whatever the reason is).
GenAI has been a great boon for such a type of person as it dissolves their struggle – they convey the idea to the machine (however awful the scribe is) and GenAI handles the grammar and style.
Granted, it is different from «hey, GenAI pet, write me a blog post on XYZ».
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I smell AI writing assistance. Which is a shame because this is otherwise very good and well-collated information about Apple's security. But AI loves to use bullet point lists just for the hell of it and it makes the information here smell way less reliable than it actually is. I'm also not sure if it's 100% accurate. My (possibly wrong) understanding of the guarded execution feature is that each GL is paired with a…
> I smell AI writing assistance. Which is a shame […] I have met multiple brilliant, very bright, and talented people (mathematicians, physicists, doctors) who excel at what they know and do, yet immensely struggle to spell, write, or both. There are also people who do not like to write (whatever the reason is). GenAI has been a great boon for such a type of person as it dissolves their struggle – they convey the ide…