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Thank you.

You're all amazing for coming to a security talk at 4:00 p.m. I know it's been a long day, but thank you so much for coming. My name is Ivan Krstic, I head Security Engineering and Architecture at Apple, which is the group that built security from the ground up into every product we ship to users.

Today the focus is iOS. And I am so proud to tell you about the role security has played as a key design philosophy for that platform.

Before we dive in, we need to set some context.

Why is security so important to Apple, and why do we believe it is so critical to our users? The answer is because our mobile devices are an unprecedented record of our lives.

Never before in history have there been objects that know so much about us. About how we spend money.

About the emails we send, and the photos we take.

About our messages. From our quickest hellos to our most intimate conversations.

When you think of it that way, you realize that protecting the security of all that information is so much more than just about technology.

For us it's a mission, and it's a mission that is nothing short of protecting the digital personal sovereignty of our users.

And when you think about it that way, you also realize that the very definition of attackers has changed.

Attackers today might be criminals looking to hold your data for ransom.

They might be unscrupulous business competitors looking to gain an edge. They might be internet service providers looking to indelibly mark your online activity for tracking and advertising without your consent.

It could be nation states, like in the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures.

And sometimes curiosity can get the better of even those close to us.

And then, of course, we must never underestimate the power of the advanced feline threat.

Thank you.

So when you think about all of these attackers, what do they want? We find that the motives tend to group in one of three groups. There is personal stalking and surveillance, which is trying to access your photos and your messages, gin access to your camera and your microphone, then there is corporate espionage, which is gaining access to your business emails and documents and your intellectual property, and then finally, there is direct financial benefit, stealing money directly from your online banking session or injecting ads and committing click fraud while you browse the web. And to do these things, attackers have created adware, spyware, ransom ware, remote access Trojans, and a variety of other malware. How do we know this? Because we've seen it on other platforms.

But not on iOS.

Nearly a decade after it came into the world, there hasn't been a single piece of iOS malware that has affected our users at scale.

This is because nearly 10 years ago, Apple realized what role mobile devices would come to play in the lives of our users.

We realized that existing security technologies would be woefully inadequate, and could not step up to the challenge, and so we decided to build the best security technologies that we could imagine to protect our customers, at a scale that is staggering. We are protecting users that use over a billion active iOS devices all over the globe.

And every single one of our security features protects a real user from real threats. But we are not in this alone. There are really three key pillars to iOS security. There is platform security which are the technologies that we build into our software and hardware.

There is users who upgrade their software to the latest and most secure versions, and then there's developers like you, who use our security technologies to build secure apps. We're going to talk about all three pillars today.

We'll start with platform security.

When you think about how security used to work, especially in enterprise settings, it was a long and complex list of thing that users have to do to try and be secure. Loading secure configuration into their devices, complex batch management schemes, complex password policies.

It was difficult, it was heavy handed, and it set up users to fail. It was so hard to be secure.

But because Apple owns all the hardware and software, we were in a position to address this in a unique and innovative way.

When you look at iOS security, we've built security directly into the silicon. We have made the devices that are secure out of the box by default.

We've made it really easy for our users to update and run the latest and most secure version. We have made it really easy to log into the devices securely with Touch ID.

We have a curated App Store, and we've made security easy to use. IOS platform security consists of a great deal of features, and today I only have time to highlight five.

We'll start with Secure Boot.

One of the most important ways of being able to trust a device is to trust the software that runs on it.

And the way we do this is by building trust into the silicon.

The Apple design system chip inside every iOS device holds Apple's public keys in an area of memory called Boot ROM, which is read only. It's written in the factory and cannot be changed after that.

And when your iOS device starts, we take that public key and the Boot ROM will validate the next step in the boot chain, which is the low-level boot loader. And only that validation passes will we move on to the next step in the chain, and we'll repeat this until iOS has fully booted, which gives us confidence that every piece of software that was used in boot was signed with Apple's Private Key.

When you think about secure boot, it's really interesting that we don't rely on any third parties to deliver secure boot trust. We don't rely on certificate authorities that are outside of our control.

The keys used or secure boot are generated management provision by Apple. The code that does the verification that I just showed you is written by Apple, and only Apple is in possession of the private keys required to sign all the software. But there is another interesting element of this, which is that when an iOS device goes to update the version of the software, it has to contact our installation authorization server, and ask for permission to update to a given version. And it does this by taking cryptographic measurements of the update, sending them to the server, and asking whether it's okay to update.

We do this because the server is now in a position to deny an iOS device the ability to move to an older, less secure version of iOS. And so when you put these two things together, you get a strong and trustworthy mechanism for relying on the software that runs every iOS device.

It's not possible to copy an old version of iOS from one device to another. It's not possible to tamper with the integrity of the software of this process. Now, let's talk about protecting user's data at rest.

If you're really serious about doing this, you don't want to take the cryptographic keys that protect user data and make them available to the application processor or the normal processor in the device. That is because the attack surface there is simply too large.

If you're serious about protecting user data at rest, you build dedicated silicon that holds those cryptographic keys.

We've done it.

We call it the secure enclave.

Now, when you think about passcodes, normally they're very short, four to six digits.

And if somehow an attacker were able to take the encrypted data off a phone, or off an iOS device, and attempt every single possible passcode, it wouldn't take them very long.

So what we do instead is we take the user's passcode, and we derive a key from it that is untangled with the hardware key that is only available to our secure enclave.

Which means it's not possible to guess passcodes offline. Passcode guesses must happen on the device, and the device is free to limit the number of attempts.

In fact, this is exactly how your iOS devices work.

After a few incorrect passcode attempts, we start imposing a time delay.

But after 10 incorrect passcode attempts, the secure enclave will simply not unlock that device again.

This has nothing to do with the erase data feature, where if it's on, the data will actually be erased after 10 incorrect passcode attempts. Even if you have this feature off, once 10 incorrect passcode attempts are made, the secure enclave will not unlock that device again regardless of how much time you give it.

So we built the system using industry standard algorithms.

We've subjected it to rigorous internal security audits, and third-party code review, and then we've taken it a step further. We have taken our core cryptographic libraries that underpin data protection, and we've posted them on the web for everyone to download and inspect.

Let's talk about sandboxing.

Sandboxing is a method for isolating data between apps.

This is because even with the best of intentions, developers sometimes make mistakes, and sandboxing is a way of mitigating some of the potential harm from those mistakes. It's a little bit like air bags or seatbelts in a car which mitigate the risk of injury in an accident.

We also use sandboxing to put some of the choices around security directly in the hands of our users. We have a mechanism called TCC, or transparency consent and control, where we can ask a user whether they trust a given app with some of their sensitive data, like location, photos and contacts. And once a user makes a decision in a dialogue by this, the sandbox mechanism and the kernel enforces that decision. Another critical element of our platform security is code signing.

When an attacker is trying to attack a device, the very first step is attempting to get their malicious code to run.

Because of this, iOS code signing doesn't just cover the operating system. It covers every app that runs on the device.

In fact, when you go to upload your app into the App Store, X code will calculate the cryptographic hash of every executable and resource in your app bundle, and will write them into a code directory alongside the app, which is then sent to the App Store.

When the user then downloads an app and runs it, our kernel will look at every executable page of memory and compare it against the code directory to make sure that it hasn't been tampered with.

As a result, an attacker can't simply take some malicious code, inject it into memory and then divert the control flow to it. Instead, they have to resort to much more complex and difficult schemes to get their malicious code to run.

Let's talk a bit about Touch ID. We know that for our iPhone users on average they unlock their phone 80 times a day. And if you have a passcode set, it adds friction to each one of those 80 unlocks.

As a result, almost half of our users didn't have a passcode set, and we knew that because the passcode is quite literally part of the key used to protect the user's data at rest, this is a problem we had to solve.

We needed a solution that was easy, that was fast, and that provided great protection to the data of our users. For us, that solution was Touch ID.

But we didn't just take a fingerprint sensor and put it in a phone.

You can change your passwords, but you can't change your biometric properties. You can't change your fingerprint.

And so we knew that we had to afford the biometric data the highest level of protection we could build.

So what we did was we connected the fingerprint sensor directly to the secure enclave, with an encrypted link.

And we made it so that when you touch your finger to the sensor, that fingerprint is transmitted directly to the secure enclave, where it is processed, and then encrypted.

And it's never made available to the application processor that runs normal applications on the phone. Now, I mentioned that before Touch ID, about half of our users had a passcode set. Now, 9 out of 10 do.

This is a shining example of what Apple is amazing at. It takes our hardware engineering expertise, our software engineering expertise, our dedication to ease of use, and combines them in a way where a normal user doesn't care about fingerprint sensors, doesn't care about secure enclaves or hash functions.

What they get is simply an amazing step forward for the security of their data. The second key pillar of iOS security is users upgrading their software.

The latest versions of iOS are always the most secure, and we're constantly making iOS more secure based on the threats we see today and threats we see in the future.

And we've built all this deep technology for trusting the software that runs on our hardware, but it doesn't matter how secure a version of iOS is, if people are not installing the latest one, the one that is most secure.

So when we think about software updates, it is not just about the device and the software it runs, it is also about our relationship with carriers, and our ability to get updates out there quickly, and also the user experience for how a user sees an update on their device. One thing we've done with iOS 9 is we greatly shrank the amount of space it took to install updates, so that users who had relatively little free space could still get the latest and more secure version of the software.

We then took a look at the user experience and said sometimes users don't want to be interrupted to do an update, so we'll give them a choice to install an update right then and there, or to install it later that night when they're probably not using their phone or be reminded the next day. The results are amazing.

Nearly 85% of our customers are running the latest version of iOS, the most secure version we have, and if you think this is easy or obvious, you only need look at some of the other platforms .

This, by the way, is a fair comparison, because Android 6 and iOS 9 were released within just a couple of weeks of each other, and for some perspective, every version of Android before 5.1.1 has a vulnerability called stage fright, which is remotely exploitable. You can exploit it by sending a specially crafted message to a vulnerable device, and gain complete control over that device.

And Google patched this bug very quickly.

But it doesn't matter, because most of their users don't have the fix.

And a fix that is not installed doesn't do anyone any good, which is why we invest so much effort not just in building secure versions of iOS, but also making it easy for our users to have that last and most secure version.

The third pillar in iOS security is developers like you, using the security technologies we provide, to build secure apps.

This means following best practices on the platform. We have an amazing number of apps that use Touch ID API to save their users from having to remember complex passwords and type them directly into the app, and last year, we introduced a feature called App Transport Security that provides strong protection to app information as it travels across the network to that app's servers.

Today I'm proud to say that at the end of 2016, App Transport Security is becoming a requirement for App Store apps.

This means that by the end of 2016, when your apps communicate with your own server back-ends, they must do so using a secure TLS channel, using TLS 1.2, unless the data being communicated is bulk data such as media streaming and data that is already encrypted.

This is going to provide a great deal of real security for our users, and the communications that your apps have over the network.

There is another piece of responsibility that rests on you, the developers, when you build your apps, and this is to know your code, and not just the code you write, but also any third-party code you actually include in your apps.

This is the because libraries you use may undermine the security of your app.

Maybe because they're doing things you're not aware of behind your back.

But maybe because there is a more recent and more secure version out there.

There is kind of an amazing example here where there is a very popular third-party networking library that had a critical flaw in the validation of security for TLS connections. And this flaw was patched very quickly, but for a period of time, there were up to 25,000 apps in the App Store that didn't have that latest, more secure version.

So it's really important that you get your third-party code from trustworthy locations, that you know what it does, and that you keep it current.

So these are our three key pillars of iOS security.

Platform security, which are the best security technology mechanisms that we can build into our hardware and software.

Our users who download the latest and most secure versions of iOS and developers like you, using our security technologies to build secure apps.

And it's a fair question to ask, so how are we doing? How good is iOS security? Security is interesting, because unlike performance, you can't measure it directly. You can't run a test, and time how long it takes to get an objective answer.

So what you're left with are indirect metrics.

And I have three that I'll share with you today.

The first one is that after a decade of its existence, there has still not been a single piece of iOS malware affecting our users at scale.

This one is the one that is most important to us.

Our users have been fantastically well protected for nearly 10 years.

The next indirect metric that is interesting is to look at some of the unfettered jailbreaks that are coming out.

These are jailbreaks that defeat iOS security mechanisms, and what is interesting about them is that the latest launch we've looked at frequently have to find and chain together between five and ten distinct vulnerabilities in order to be able to defeat platform security mechanisms.

This is much higher than on any other platform.

And the reason is because iOS security measures work together in lock step in such a way that defeating all of them takes a long time and a lot of work. For my last indirect metric, I want you to take it with a grain of salt.

As probably most of you know, there is a black market for software vulnerabilities.

And every once in a while, some of the prices on the black market become known.

Usually these prices are tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes a hundred thousand. But in 2013, the New York Times learned that an iOS vulnerability sold for $500,000 and last year, Forbes interviewed a jailbreak developer who said that most experts agree that the black market price of an unfettered iOS jailbreak is a million dollars.

Take that with a grain of salt, but it's a fascinating number to think about.

So where does this leave us? Clearly, security is a process and not a destination.

We're not done with iOS security and we never will be.

It's also not something that we just got interested in recently. What you're seeing now is a result of a decade of our best work in protecting our users.

But the bad guys aren't standing still and we will constantly evolve our security to defeat not only the threats of today, but also the threats of tomorrow.

We will take our hardware expertise and our software expertise, and we will build the best security technologies that we can imagine to protect our customers and how they use their mobile devices today and also how they'll use them tomorrow, and protect our customers against today's attackers and tomorrow's, even if they are cats .

Thank you very much.

For those of you who want to learn more, I invite you to read the iOS security guide, which creates a great amount of technical detail about all the great features I just covered, including many others that I didn't have time for, like iCloud keychain and two-factor authentication, and a link will be available at this session site.

Thank you again.