LARPing is imagining that Lockdown mode protects you from state-level actors. It is frankly baffling why a industry that has been laughing for literal decades at even the possibility of stopping state-level actors just turns around and uncritically believes Apple's marketing team with literally zero support, evidence or proof except for a long track record of failure. You would think that extraordinary claims would demand extraordinary evidence.

We have seen multiple software hacks resulting in >10 million dollar payouts. Apple's bug bounty program only pays out 4 million dollars (2 million dollars (2x) more than non-Lockdown) for a zero-click total compromise that can trivially worm to take down hundreds of millions of iPhones simultaneously. Even at the low end of that cyberattack payout range that is still a >2x ROI if your successful cyberattack depends on a iPhone zero-click, with many publicly known attacks being in the 10x ROI range. Lockdown mode, at best, raises the bar slightly for commercial profit-motivated attackers and reduces their profit margin from wildly profitable to slightly less, but still, wildly profitable.

And of course I am using the Apple bug bounty program as merely a available metric with at least some semblance of objective support. There are zero certifications, audits, or analysis that Apple has even attempted that would confirm any claim of protection against state level actors.

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orf 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> We have seen multiple software hacks resulting in >10 million dollar payouts

This sets a nice price bar for exploitation. Is someone willing to pay 10+ million dollars to get access to your phone?

The obvious caveat here is that for a lot less than 10 million dollars someone can be hired to hit you with a metal pipe until you give up your passcode.

> click total compromise that can trivially worm to take down hundreds of millions of iPhones simultaneously

Where is the profit motive in doing this? Possibility is one thing, but a realistic threat is another.

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microtonal an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Is someone willing to pay 10+ million dollars to get access to your phone?

Not yours specifically usually, but there is a lot of money in a general tool that law enforcement can use to read out phones. Of course, most of them focus on physical access. In the few Cellebrite reports/presentations that have leaked, iPhones would fall after a relatively short time (IIRC a few months), but did better than most Android phones (except GrapheneOS).

Also, sometimes you do not need the 10M exploit, you can buy many cheaper exploits and make a chain yourself.

The obvious caveat here is that for a lot less than 10 million dollars someone can be hired to hit you with a metal pipe until you give up your passcode

If they hit you with a metal pipe, it's likely that you won't survive even if you give up your passcode. So most likely you are protecting something or someone else. Set up a duress PIN so that you have options in that case.

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Veserv 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

... really? Zero-click RCEs can be used on arbitrarily many phones until they are discovered which usually takes on the order of months. You do not need to burn them on every individual target.

As a example of how they might be used in that fashion for profit, NSO group had a revenue of 240 million dollars in 2020. Many of their customers were governments who wanted to spy on activists and journalists. NSO group was in the business of economies of scale to democratize access to journalist devices by reusing a small stockpile of exploits across many targets with enough revenue to assure a steady stream of new exploits as fast as they were burned.

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orf 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You’re right, I misstated. It’s not 10 million per exploitation, it instead limits the pool of people who can exploit you to those willing and have the ability to spend 10 million+ on an exploit.

That is still quite a small pool, and there are other network effects preventing any Joe blogs with that much capital from launching an exploitation campaign.

	▲	Veserv 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Again, no. You do not need to spend 10 million on a exploit if you are working with a company like NSO Group who sells white-glove access to target individual as a service. The cost lower bound is going to be on the order of ((cost of exploit) / (number of times exploit can be used)) and the denominator there is going to easily be in the hundreds to thousands. Of course prices are likely to be higher than the minimum due to profit margins. To, once again, use the same example of NSO Group as it is infamous and well-documented [1]. In 2016 it was 500,000 $ upfront and 650,000 $/year for 10 devices. That article claims Saudi Arabia was monitoring 15,000 phones at a average cost of 10,000 $/phone. In [2] it was 7 million $ for 15 devices, but the upfront versus marginal cost per device is not broken down. And this was a relatively "above-board" company in the sense that they were a legitimate business entity with government deals which commands a premium relative to random unknown blackhat organization with no reputation. And again, my original comment was discussing commercial profit-motivated attackers for which 1 million $ is easily within reach and just a cost of doing business to unlock greater amounts of profit. That is less than the cost of setting up a McDonalds. There is a vast, vast gap spanning factors of millions between Joe Schmo and commercial actors and a even vaster gap to state actors. There is no evidence that Lockdown mode is adequate against even commercial actors, let alone the vastly more capable state actors. [1] https://prodefence.io/news/pegasus-spyware-operating-costs-c... [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/meta-suit-aga...

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bri3d an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I strongly disagree that there is no evidence that Lockdown mode is effective; there have been numerous exposed, active iOS exploitation campaigns of which none have worked against Lockdown mode. When we're trying to prove a negative, that's actually some of the strongest evidence we can get.

The economics of the device exploitation industry are completely orthogonal from bug bounty payouts; the markets only overlap at the _extreme_ fringes. Trying to use one as a proxy for the other is meaningless.