Apple and Bug Bounties

I know that there are bigger problems to discuss about Apple’s approach to business and partnerships at the mo, but their handling of security researchers seems particularly cynical and hypocritical. See, for example, this post about four reported iPhone 0days that went ignored and the nine other cases linked in that article.

Apple advertise themselves as the privacy company. By this, they really mean that their products are designed to share as much of your data with Apple as they are comfortable with, and that beyond that you should probably assume that nobody else is involved. But their security development lifecycle tells another story.

“Wait, did you just pivot from talking about privacy to security?” No! You can have security without privacy: this blog has that, on a first glance. All of the posts and pages are public, anybody can read them, but I want to make sure that what you read is actually what I wrote (the integrity of the posts) and that nothing stops you from reading it when you want (the availability). On a closer examination, I also care that there are things you don’t have access to: any of the account passwords, configuration settings, draft posts, etc. So in fact the blog has privacy requirements too, and those are handled in security by considering and protecting the confidentiality of those private assets. You can have security without privacy, but not privacy without security.

Something, I’m not sure what from the outside, is wrong with the security development lifecycle at Apple. As a privacy-focused company they should also be a security-focused company, but they evidently never had the same “trustworthy computing” moment that Microsoft did. I’m not going to do any kind of deep dive into CVE counts here, just provide the following high-level support for the case that Apple is, at best, doing no better than anybody else in the industry at this.

Leave a Comment