How do you not feel embarrassed after typing that edit. The iPhone flair also gives it a special kind of irony. The timing of me finding this post 5 years later right when there’s a discovery of the NSA backdoor in Apple A12-A16 chips is impeccable.
How do you not feel embarrassed after typing that edit. The iPhone flair also gives it a special kind of irony. The timing of me finding this post 5 years later right when there’s a discovery of the NSA backdoor in Apple A12-A16 chips is impeccable.
I don’t think it’s generally so direct. backdoors are only so useful until they leak and companies have to patch them because now anyone can make use of them. so the NSA tries to put backdoors into cryptographic standards and the like where they’re literally the only ones who hold the keys and the strength of the protocols prevents anyone else from discovering those keys independently (see: the kerfuffle over the NIST elliptic curve). beyond that, they employ lots of people to try and develop 0-days, which give them backdoors companies don’t know about. I’m sure they do try and strongarm companies into adding more overt backdoors but it’s kind of a dumb plan - it’s what politicians think works but it’s really just making it easier for adversaries to attack the US. who knows, maybe they are that dumb, though.