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0 pointsVeserv10d ago0 comments

That is a total strawman. The standard of “effective” being used by the person I was responding to and Apple themselves is “protects against state actors targeting you”, not “has any benefit whatsoever” or even “has a material benefit”.

Protecting against state actors is not a instantaneous property of the present. It demands durable protection against compromise by state actors who can easily spend tens to hundreds of millions of dollars on teams of hundreds for multiple years to develop novel, durable exploits known only to them. To the extent that compromises exist, they would require expected resource expenditure in excess of what state actors can deploy or are in excess of the value derivable by state actors which is going to be in the hundreds of millions to billions of dollar range to constitute as being "effective against state actors targeting you".

Protecting against state actors means secure against Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, and the NSA. That is the unsupported marketing bullshit I am calling out.

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saagarjha9d ago

Apple is almost certainly spending hundreds of millions if not billions on software security.

VeservOP9d ago

Sure, but that is not related to anything I said.

I said that “protects against state actors” means the cost of finding a exploit as generally applicable and powerful as a zero-click RCE needs to cost on the order of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars per exploit to be problematic for state actors to field.

That amount of resources is a competent team of 100 skilled individuals finding zero zero-click RCEs after 3 years of full time investigation. That could credibly be called secure against state actors, though would still not be out of reach of a real military operation as a hundred million dollars is still just the cost of a single jet fighter.