> The Secure Enclave is designed to prevent exfiltration of the UID key. On earlier Apple devices this key lived in the application processor itself, and could (allegedly) be extracted if the device was jailbroken and kernel patched. Speaking as a jailbreaker, this is actually incorrect. At least as of previous revisions, the UID key lives in hardware - you can ask the hardware AES engine to encrypt or decrypt using…
But it is an absolute certainty that communications technologies built and operated by major American industry are wholly compromised. To believe otherwise is to grossly misunderestimate the nature of State intelligence actors. The historical record is clear that big telecom + hardware providers have always been in bed with State power, both in America and elsewhere, and the Snowden docs pretty clearly show that's still true today.
Maybe Apple's announcement means that the county sheriff can't read your teenage son's weed-dealing text messages. But if bin Laden had an iPhone, the men in the windowless buildings would beyond a shadow of a doubt be reading his communications, probably via seven or eight independent attack vectors (not counting the compromised publicly switched telephone network, over-the-air signals, etc.)
If you have secrets, keep them off of communication technologies run by large companies. Especially when those technologies are 100% closed source and the companies in question have openly admitted including backdoors in previous versions of the tech you're currently using.