from Hacker News

Kaspersky finds hardware backdoor in 5 generations of Apple Silicon (2024)

by airhangerf15 on 2/10/25, 6:07 PM with 35 comments

  • by pvg on 2/10/25, 6:19 PM

  • by post-it on 2/10/25, 6:20 PM

    This is a year old, does anyone have an article with updates?
  • by ryao on 2/10/25, 8:57 PM

    Anyone who is paranoid about hardware backdoors might enjoy this:

    https://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~somlo/BTCP/

  • by markus_zhang on 2/10/25, 6:51 PM

    I read the original Kaspersky analysis and found it very weird that such a cyber security company that works with the Russian government closely allows US made phones accessing their networks as late as 2023 Dec.
  • by Synaesthesia on 2/10/25, 6:59 PM

    According to this blog it has been patched. But it really does open up the question of how much do we trust Apple, Google and other large tech companies.
  • by rincebrain on 2/10/25, 8:22 PM

    I always assumed, not having worked at Apple, but from the observed functionality and the fact that they could patch it, that this was a debug backdoor that didn't get killswitched before release builds and then they decided it would draw attention to it if they killed it after the fact.
  • by derelicta on 2/11/25, 9:14 AM

    Smells like CIA stuff. Impressive.
  • by daft_pink on 2/10/25, 7:22 PM

    You have to wonder if the only reason the iPhone 16 isn’t included in this article, is because the article was written before the iPhone 16 existed.
  • by Qem on 2/10/25, 6:45 PM

    I wonder if something like this is behind the push from Microsoft to obsolete a lot of hardware with the windows 11 release. The NSA pushed them to require a hardware upgrade so people replace devices bearing old processors with new ones featuring the latest bleeding-edge backdoors.
  • by beardyw on 2/10/25, 6:42 PM

    Wow, this is terrible.