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I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next guy but, unfortunately for Leo’s theory regarding a National Security Letter, while they allow the intelligence community to request information from a company and not allow the company to disclose the request I do not believe they give the Agencies authority to require companies to perform substantial engineering work like creating backdoors.
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Unfortunately, we’re still left with the fact that an extremely well-secured backdoor was created and implemented on iPhone, and was so well designed that access to that backdoor could be blocked without any detrimental effects whatsoever to the OS. Leo may be off on his theory, but the facts still remain.
At this point, we need Senator Ron Whyden to issue a letter to Apple asking for an explanation. If the backdoor was the result of an NSI, that could relieve the obligation for silence Apple’s part.
EDIT: Steve Gibson’s explanation in the show notes for SN 956 is perhaps the best explanation for what happened here.
Security Now! #956 - 01-09-24 - The Inside Tracks (grc.com)
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I think the best scenario for Apple is if this turns out to be a backdoor someone put in for testing purposes and forgot about, as Alex was suggesting. If was put in intentionally as an “only we know and can use to stop the end of the world” kind of thing like Steve is suggesting, or was in response to a national security letter which they couldn’t disclose, they’ll lose the trust of just about everyone.
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What speaks about “forgotten” is that they updated the encryption key for it with each new generation… But it could be a secure testing interface, but I’ll wait for Apple to come clean and say what is going on.
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