I believe they're about to do this: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/8/20756629/apple-iphone-secu...
No sources or structure layout or symbols, so you're still stuck waddling through megabytes of compiled code to reverse-engineer everything from scratch.
It's Apple drumming up absolutely nothing, and from my point of view it's mostly a PR stunt.
Well, I don't think it's quite "nothing". Newer phones don't have access to checkm8, and getting a private jailbreak or exploit working can be non-trivial. And in some cases, researchers may need to avoid reporting that exploit to Apple in order to keep using it.
It's a good step. It's just not sufficient, especially given all the other restrictions.
And this will continue to happen until Apple just starts selling the damn things to anyone who wants them, instead of trying to gatekeep them to people who are playing by their ridiculous security disclosure rules.
Oh, that's a shame. The slide in the referenced tweet says, "advanced debug capabilities", so I'd assumed that's what it meant. I wonder what else that could mean?
https://twitter.com/benhawkes/status/1286021329246801921
> It looks like we won't be able to use the Apple "Security Research Device" due to the vulnerability disclosure restrictions, which seem specifically designed to exclude Project Zero and other researchers who use a 90 day policy.
For some reason this ridiculous restriction reminds me when Apple sued Samsung because their phones had round corners.
Rounded corners are the after-the-strategic-decision legal justification.
This is no longer possible on any phone, tablet, or computer Apple sells: all require online activation with device-specific info. There is no way to put the device back into a known state offline or without Apple having an opportunity to tamper with it (or be forced to tamper with it).
