alt Hacker NewsApple themselves keep assuming that they themselves can be unquestionably trusted. The same company that keeps inventing ever more elaborate ways to forcibly insert itself between users and developers to collect rent even when explicitly required by regulators to open up its devices to allow anyone to freely install anything.
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I’d argue this why security research versions of various devices are made and distributed to researchers. There was a big thing with private cloud compute and iPhone, I can see the same thing happening for exclaves
They did firewall it from the OS, but yes, you have to trust that Apple engineered it the way they said they engineered it.
This is true of all forms of confidential compute.
That is pretty much the case with any software that you don't build and host yourself. Is it possible that they are lying? Sure.
You do realize that those two goals conflict.
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Apple’s agreement is that if you trust Apple, their stuff is the best in the business - if Apple is not a weak link, it’s real hard to argue with the design, and the ease of use and UX for the level of security you get is unequal anywhere else. Apple’s side of the bargain is you pay them money, and lots of it.
If you don’t trust Apple, you’re on your own - you can probably recreate all this on a FOSS stack, but you’re gonna have to do it repeatedly for everything, and you’re on the hook for explaining it to everyone you know so they can use it, too. It’s not that you _can’t_ do it yourself, it’s just a whole lot harder than if you accept the bargain and trust Apple.
Whether or not you want to do that is up to you, but I don’t think anyone’s in the dark on what the bargain is.