A Reverse Engineer's Anatomy of the macOS Boot Chain and Security Architecture (stack.int.mov)

Holy cow I was reading and reading and then I realized I was only 10% through!

This is top 10 for greatest HN deep dives. I learned something new almost every sentence, and could not complete it on my first attempt.

This is top tier. Well written and insanely detailed.

This is a really interesting deep dive but why does the article hedge so much? For example, in the first few sections it says things like "... typically reveals the following sequence" or "The Boot ROM sets a specific control bit in the AES configuration register (e.g., AES_CMD_USE_GID)", which makes it sound like the author wasn't actually sure if any of this was accurate and was guessing.

Can't seem to load it. FF on Android. SSL problem?

Incredible article. int summarizes it well:

Final Thought: macOS is no longer just a Unix system. It is a distributed system running on a single die, governed by a hypervisor that doesn't exist in software. The kernel is dead; long live the Monitor.

Will this enable someone who buys an apple laptop to boot directly into a third-party OS, from a thumb drive? Last I heard, they were still too locked down to allow it.

The security of the Apple ecosystem is miles ahead of others. Every time I reverse engineer some component of their OS, it is very different from what I've seen before. I always find myself surprised by their thoughtfulness and engineering craft.

Recently I've taken on their code signing component. The concepts they've created, such as identifying applications by their "designated requirements" is a stroke of genius. It makes the system completely stateless and capable of almost anything without auxiliary data structure or additional code.

I've seen other engineering teams try and fail at building something similar, and never with such powerful simplicity.