I’m still relatively new to HN, but I continue to find it fascinating when people share their perspectives on how things work internally. Before joining Apple, I was a senior engineer on the Visual Studio team at Microsoft, and it's amazing how often I bump into people who hold very strong yet incorrect assumptions about how systems are built and maintained.

> I suppose I must not have touched the parts of the platform that use them

It’s understandable not to have direct exposure to every component, given that a complete macOS build and its associated applications encompass tens of millions of lines of code. /s

That said, there’s an important distinction between making systems challenging for casual hackers to analyze and the much harder (if not impossible) goal of preventing skilled researchers from discovering how something works.

> Also, the reason early tools couldn't preserve selector information was selector uniqueing

That isn't even remotely how we were making things difficult back then.

I led the SGX team at Intel for a while, working on in-memory, homomorphic encryption. In that case, the encryption couldn’t be broken through software because the keys were physically fused into the CPU. Yet, a company in China ultimately managed to extract the keys by using lasers to remove layers of the CPU die until they could read the fuses directly.

I’ll wrap up by noting that Apple invests extraordinary effort into making the critical components exceptionally difficult to reverse-engineer. As with good obfuscation—much like good design or craftsmanship—the best work often goes unnoticed precisely because it’s done so well.

I'm done here - you go on believing whatever it is you believe...

I'm thoroughly enjoying this thread by the way, between someone who is clearly informed and educated in platform research, and pretty enthusiastic and interested in the field, and yourself - an deeply experienced engineer with truly novel contributions to the conversation that we don't often see.

Looking very forward to more of your insight/comments. Hopefully your NDA has expired on some topic that you can share in detail!

Thank you for your comment. I started this thread just as a simple "job well done" to the authors. I didn't expect to be told that my work doesn't exist. ;-)

No one ever notices plastic surgery when it is done well. The same can be true for obfuscation. But, as I indicated, no amount of obfuscation is foolproof when dealing with experienced, well-funded attackers. The best you can do is make their task annoying.