Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

TL:DR Apple’s claims to being privacy-first are a marketing sham

Apple claims to hold privacy at its core, but it has been an advertising company for at least a decade, and now that smartphone and computer sales are plateauing and new products like the Apple Vision Pro have failed to set the world on fire, Services revenue (an euphemism for the 30% App Store tax on developers and advertising) is critical to maintaining the company’s stock price.

Recent behavior from Apple has confirmed Google or Meta’s take that Apple’s privacy claims are just that, clever marketing to obscure the fact the privacy measures they do have are mainly there to stymie its competitors:

• Apple forces app developers to ask permission to access the advertising tracking ID (IDFA), but exempts itself from that requirement by a truly Clintonesque redefinition of tracking as “sharing data with other companies, not with ourselves”—one rule for thee but not for me

• Apple’s notarizarion feature leaks information to Apple on what apps you have installed on your device. What’s worse, this is sent unencrypted so anyone with network access can also grab this info. Apple promised to give a way to disable this misfeature (which also has a noticeable performance impact for developers) but quietly reneged on this.

• Apple would upload recordings of Siri queries without your consent, and Apple employees and contractors had access to them

• Apple implemented a CSAM scanning feature, whereby your iPhone would rat you out before the government even asked them to do so. Even though they reversed themselves, they set a precedent authoritarian governments will certainly avail themselves of.

• When they introduced the Journal app, they gave them wide-ranging access to other apps’ data without consent.

• Apple silently opted you into “Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement”. This an Orwellian misrepresentation, as your browser is tracking you on behalf of advertisers, just as Google Chrome is doing with its Topics API. Firefox is equally guilty of this (PDF) and unrepentant. Even Google, the most voyeuristic of the surveillance-industrial complex, asked for permission before enabling this in Chrome, albeit with wildly misleading wording because no one does dark patterns quite as smugly as don’t do be evil Google.

• Apple silently opted you in to “Enhanced Visual Search”, where it uploads fingerprints of landmarks in your photos to its server. It claims to use differential privacy and homomorphic encryption to make this privacy compliant, but this still leaks information, even if Apple’s implementation were perfectly bug-free (given the abysmal track record of Apple QA of late, this would require heroic levels of credulity).

• They did it also for “Improve Search"—Seeing a pattern here yet?

Here are the settings you need to review and change from their privacy-invading defaults, in chronological order of when they were introduced. Apple also has the nasty habit of silently turning them back on, so you will need to check this list regularly. You will also need to set these on each device separately.

iOS and iPadOS

• Disable the IDFA altogether and do not allow apps to ask for it:
  • Settings / Privacy & Security / Tracking / Allow Apps to Request to Track / (turn off)
• Disable Apple’s own Ad network tracking:
  • Settings / Privacy & Security / Apple Advertising / Personalized Ads / (turn off)
• Disable Sharing of information with Apple, including Siri recordings:
  • Settings / Analytics & Improcements / (disable all of them)
• Private Click Measurement:
  • Settings / Apps / Safari / Advanced / Privacy Preserving Ad Measurement / (turn off)
• Improve Search:
  • Settings / Search / Help Apple Improve Search
  • Settings / Apps / Safari / Search / Search Engine Suggestions / (turn off)
  • Settings / Apps / Safari / Search / Safari Suggestions / (turn off)
• Visual Search:
  • Settings / Apps / Photos / Enhanced Visual Search / (turn off)
• Journal App:
  • Settings / Privacy & Security / Journaling Suggestions / (turn them all off)

macOS

• Disable analytics:
  • System Settings / Privacy & Security / Analytics & Improvements / (turn them all off)
  • Sign in to account.apple.com, then Privacy / iCloud Analytics / Share iCloud analytics / (turn off)
  • This might also be a good time to request export of all the data Apple holds on you
• Disable Apple’s Ad tracking:
  • System Settings / Privacy & Security / Apple Advertising / Personalized Ads / (turn off)
• Disable Siri:
  • System Settings / Apple Intelligence & Siri / Siri / (turn off)
  • System Settings / Apple Intelligence & Siri / Siri history / Delete Siri & Dictation History / (click on the button)
• Private Click Measurement:
  • Safari / Settings / Advanced / Allow privacy-preserving measurement of ad effectiveness / (turn off)
• Improve Search:
  • System Settings / Accessibility / Motor / Voice Control / Improve assistive voice features / (turn off)
  • System Settings / Spotlight / Siri Suggestions / (turn off)
  • System Settings / Spotlight / Help Apple Improve Search / (turn off)

Further actions

Ideally, change your default browser to something better, like Vivaldi or LibreWolf.

Stop iMessage from using insecure unencrypted SMS as a fallback (warning: this setting is buggy and often ignored):

• on iOS: Setting / Apps / Messages / Send as Text Message / (turn off)

Better yet, ditch both SMS and iMessage for Signal or WhatsApp, who do not have an unencrypted option to snare you. See also this Signal hardening checklist.

Install Little Snitch, an outbound firewall you can use to control what sites apps can connect to.

Disable Apple Intelligence.

Ultimately, switch to Linux and GrapheneOS or LineageOS.

TL:DR The missing (documentation) for this otherwise fine switch

I was first exposed to Cisco network equipment in 1995, and for a long time I used their gear for my home network. Then around 2012 I switched to Juniper switches for their more sane management interface and more reasonable prices. Neither have WiFI equipment that’s really appropriate for a home setting, however, with onerous licensing terms or crackpot schizophrenic hardware like my old Cisco 877W that was one half ADSL router and one half WiFi AP (coexisting uneasily in the same physical box with separate management interfaces).

By the time I got fed up with single consumer APs, their lack of coverage and tendency to burn out within a year due to inadequate power supplies, I bit the bullet, went with the Ubiquiti Networks UniFi solution that I use to the day. At one point I considered switching to TP-Link Omada, but procrastination paid off, and I dodged a bullet.

Unfortunately, Ubiquiti doesn’t have switches with both SFP+ interfaces (for fiber optic connections) and 10G-BaseT (for copper like on my Mac Studio), other than the expensive, bulky and non-fanless Pro HD 24. While you can easily get 10G-BaseT copper SFP+ modules, the power draw of a 10G-BaseT port is actually more than the nominal power capacity of a SFP+ port and in my experience they are unreliable. For a while, I used the ZyXEL XGS1250-12, which has 3 2.5G/10G copper and one SFP+, but I would prefer a switch with more SFP+ ports.

After digging through reviews, and ServeTheHome, I found out about Hasivo switches, an inexpensive Chinese brand offering great value for money and interesting port configurations. Their F1100W-4SX-4XGT offers 4x SFP+ and 4x 2.5G/10G copper ports for ￡152.39 plus VAT, so I ordered one. When I received it, I plugged it into my home office Ubiquiti USW Pro Max 16 PoE with a Ubiquiti 10G DAC cable, plugged my Mac, and everything just worked as it should.

The Power and RET LEDs were flashing red and green, however. Furthermore, this is supposed to be a L3-capable switch with a Web UI, but no DHCP request or IP appeared in my UniFi console or IP address (spoiler: it’s 192.168.0.1, and DHCP is not enabled by default). The switch did not include any documentation, there is nothing available on the Hasivo site, not even in Chinese (they have documentation links, but they point to a completely different product, and even then are largely useless).

Here’s how I got it to work, using information gleaned from various Internet forums:

1. First, get a Cisco-style RJ45 serial console cable like the Cable Matters one, hook it to the Console port on the Hasivo.
2. Start a terminal session, in my case on Linux:

chown uucp:uucp /dev/ttyUSB0
cu -l /dev/ttyUSB0 -s 38400

3. The login is admin and the password is admin

4. The terminal console UI is a knockoff of the Cisco IOS CLI:

   1. enable to enter administrator mode
   2. conf t to enter configuration mode
   3. interface vlan1 to configure the admin interface
   4. ip address 10.254.254.115/8 (or whatever you want it to be)
   5. exit to go back to the interface level
   6. exit to go back to the global config level
   7. show interface brief to verify the config was applied correctly
   8. copy running-config startup-config to make the changes persistent

5. You can now point your web browser to http://10.254.254.115/

Some braver people than myself are attempting to get OpenWRT running on the switch, but they doesn’t seem to have succeeded yet.

TL:DR Fiber as the backbone of your home network is easier than you’d think

My apartment, like many, is elongated. The living room is on one end, the bedrooms (one of which is my home office), on the other side. This makes it hard to cover both sides with a single WiFi access point, or to have uniform Internet access speed on the wired network. I have a semi-pro Ubiquiti UniFi network of WiFi access points and switches, which makes it realtively easy, but only if you have good backhaul connectivity between the APs.

For the longest time I used G.hn powerline networking bridges made by Devolo. Unfortunately, powerline is at least as unreliable as wireless networking and this made for frequent brown-outs requiring unplugging the Devolo Magic 2 boxes to power-cycle them. I know Devolo doesn’t make the actual PLC controllers and their firmware, probably made by Broadcom from the MAC addresses, but surely they could implement something as simple as a watchdog timer to reboot the PLC if no heartbeats are seen in a while?

At any rate, at some point I flipped the bozo switch on the Devolos and decided it was long past time to install proper Ethernet across the two halves of the apartment, which is easier said than done in a rental. To make things more complex, my Internet connection that used to be absymal Vodafone/BT OpenReach VDSL ending in my office was upgraded to a fiber ISP but this terminated by the door in half-way no-man’s land.

This was around the time I was experimenting with 10G Ethernet in the core of my home network, using Ubiquiti’s relatively inexpensive (for the time) USW-Aggregation switches with 8 SFP+ 10G ports. Speaking of which, while you can buy 10GBase-T SFP+ modules allowing you to use copper 10G Ethernet like the one on my Mac Studio, their power draw exceeds the specs of the SFP+ standard and they are unreliable, stick with fiber or use a switch with actual 10G ports (in my case a ZyXEL XGS1250-12, although it has an unfortunate tendency to overheat).

Contrary to what you may think, multimode fiber is much thinner (thus more discreet) and far more flexible than copper Ethernet cable (fiber above in the picture, copper below).

I conceived the idea of running a 30m pre-terminated fiber cable, made by a French company, as it turns out, along the crown molding in the ceiling, held in place with transparent plastic 3M Command hooks originally meant for holding Christmas lights, and easily removed without damage to the paintwork (this is a rental, remember).

I had to run it along a snaking route in red to stay along the crown molding, but even with my tyro DIY skills it only took a couple of hours to set up and is barely visible unless you know to look for it. While I don’t actually have any 10G devices in my living room yet, I do have a WiFi7 access point and it won’t be bottlenecked by the Ethernet network.

I still have a Devolo link between my office and the AP in my bedroom, but that’s a much shorter distance and much less unreliable.

I have a work-issued computer that I keep rigorously separate from my personal stuff. It belongs to my employer and thus I do not keep personal files on it, or access personal email and certainly don’t save personal passwords on it. I even have it on a separate VLAN on my home network.

This is why I was horrified when I went to the LinkedIn website on my work computer (to look at a colleague’s posting) and it automatically started a single sign-on with my company’s GMail (my work address is of course linked to my LinkedIn profile).

This means a company with Google Apps can potentially access your LinkedIn account without your permission. Considering LinkedIn’s past record of egregious security failures¹, it shouldn’t be too surprising, but still…

I couldn’t find any setting to disable SSO, and it seems the only way to prevent this is to turn on two-factor authentication (where the only options are the grossly insecure phone SMS text message method or the equally phishable TOTP Authenticator app codes, not the actually secure Webauthn/FIDO U2F USB keys).

TL:DR A way out of our software supply-chain security mess

As memorably illustrated by XKCD, the way most software is built today is by bolting together reusable software packages (dependencies) with a thin layer of app-specific integration code that glues it all together. Others have described more eloquently than I can the mess we are in, and the technical issues.

Crises like the log4j fiasco or the Solarwinds debacle are forcing the community to wake up to something security experts have been warning about for decades: this culture of promiscuous and undiscriminating code reuse is unsustainable. On the other hand, for most software developers without the resources of a Google or Apple behind them, being able to leverage third-parties for 80% of their code is too big an advantage to abandon.

This is fundamentally an economic problem:

• To secure a software project to commercial standards (i.e. not the standards required for software that operates a nuclear power plant or the NSA’s classified systems, or that requires validation by formal methods like TLA+), some form of vetting and code reviews of each software dependency (and its own dependencies, and the transitive closure thereof) needs to happen.
• Those code reviews are necessary, difficult, boring, labor-intensive, require expertise and somebody needs to pay for that hard work.
• We cannot rely entirely on charitable contributions like Google’s Project Zero or volunteer efforts.
• Each version of a dependency needs to be reviewed. Just because version 11 of foo is secure doesn’t mean a bug or backdoor wasn’t introduced in version 12. On the other hand, reviewing changes takes less effort than the initial review.
• It makes no sense for every project that consumes a dependency to conduct its own duplicative independent code review.
• Securing software is a public good, but there is a free-rider problem.
• Because security is involved, there will be bad actors trying to actively subvert the system, and any solution needs to be robust to this.
• This is too important to allow a private company to monopolize.
• It is not just the Software Bill of Materials that needs to be vetted, but also the process. Solarwinds was probably breached because state-sponsored hackers compromised their Continuous Integration infrastructure, and there is Ken Thompson’s classic paper on the risks of Trusting Trust (original ACM article as a PDF).
• Trust depends on the consumer and the context. I may trust Google on security, but I certainly don’t on privacy.

I believe the solution will come out of insurance, because that is the way modern societies handle diffuse risks. Cybersecurity insurance suffers from the same adverse-selection risk that health insurance does, which is why premiums are rising and coverage shrinking.

If insurers require companies to provide evidence that their software is reasonably secure, that creates a market-based mechanism to fund the vetting. This is how product safety is handled in the real world, with independent organizations like Underwriters Laboratories or the German TÜVs emerging to provide testing services.

Governments can ditch their current hand-wavy and unfocused efforts and push for the emergence these solutions, notably by long-overdue legislation on software liability, and at a minimum use their purchasing power to make them table stakes for government contracts (without penalizing open-source solutions, of course).

What we need is, at a minimum:

• Standards that will allow organizations like UL or individuals like Tavis Ormandy to make attestations about specific versions of dependencies.
• These attestations need to have licensing terms associated with them, so the hard work is compensated. Possibly something like copyright or Creative Commons so open-source projects can use them for free but commercial enterprises have to pay.
• Providers of trust metrics to assess review providers. Ideally this would be integrated with SBOM standards like CycloneDX, SPDX or SWID.
• A marketplace that allows consumers of dependencies to request audits of a version that isn’t already covered.
• A collusion-resistant way to ensure there are multiple independent reviews for critical components.
• Automated tools to perform code reviews at lower cost, possibly using Machine Learning heuristics, even if the general problem can be proven the be computationally untractable.