Apple's commitment to protecting customer privacy includes extreme testing of its Secure Enclave chips inside a top-secret lab, a new report reveals today. The testing includes ensuring that the chips remain secure even when subjected to extreme temperatures, whether low or high…
The Independent learned about the tests through an interview with Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.
The goal of testing the chips is to determine whether the chips will experience problems in such extreme scenarios – and if they do, to ensure that this only happens in labs and not when they are inside users' phones. Any “bad” behavior by the chips could be fatal to a device.
It may seem unlikely that a normal phone would be subjected to these extreme conditions, given the possibility that users will find themselves in an environment of very low temperatures (-40C) or very high temperatures (110C). Of course, this fear is not very normal. If the chips are eventually shown to have problems in such conditions, then the fraudsters will start placing the phones in such conditions until they manage to get all their data.
If such a hypothetical bug is discovered once the phones have already reached customers, Apple will be unable to do anything. Chips cannot be changed once the devices are in the hands of users, unlike software updates. Therefore, we all understand that it is very important to identify any bugs before the devices are shipped to users to ensure that the chips can be safe in any condition.
Federighi rejected Google CEO Sundar Pichai's accusation that Apple is effectively selling privacy as a luxury good.
Federigi, giving the impression that he was genuinely surprised by Pichai’s public attack, states: “On the one hand, it seems like companies in the last few months have seemed to be giving priority to privacy. The issue of security is much deeper than a few press releases. I think you have to look fundamentally at corporate cultures and values and the business model. And those don’t change overnight.
"But we're definitely trying to set a good example for the world by showing them how to raise consumer expectations of products, whether they're getting them from us or from other people. And of course, we love, ultimately, selling Apple products to everyone, certainly not just as a luxury since we believe that good quality products are something everyone should have."
Federighi also addressed the widespread criticism surrounding Apple's decision to store iCloud data in China on servers operated by GCBD, a government-owned company. Some believed Apple should have pulled out and stopped offering iCloud in China instead of moving in.
Federighi says that location data is stored where it has the least impact when the amount of information collected is minimized and whatever is stored is in ways that prevent people from engaging with it.
He goes on to argue that because the data is encrypted, even if it were intercepted – even if someone actually had possession of the drives that store the data itself – they wouldn’t be able to read it. For example, only the two users sending iMessages can read them, so the fact that they’re sent via a Chinese server should be irrelevant if the security is working. All they’d likely be able to see is a garbled message that requires a special key to unlock.
It should be noted, however, that iCloud backups of iPhones – which include a lot of sensitive data – are not yet end-to-end encrypted. This means that Apple holds the encryption keys that can be used to access the data in response to requests that may be made by law.
