It's interesting watching all the speculation about "was it a backdoor, or just a bug?"
Lots of points in favor or against:
1) It's a huge compromise, and "open" to anyone to exploit, which would ultimately get caught and fixed faster. But it's also not targeting anything specific, so there's less of a signature of the attacker.
2) Incredibly simple, and thus a plausible mistake.
3) Hidden in plain sight
I'd generally come down on the side of "accident". The better question is if an systematic testing system for exploitable weaknesses (or a lucky chance finding) could find something like this (either a regression, or a badly implemented new feature) and exploit it -- basically assuming there are going to be errors in implementations. That's understood to be a standard technique in the IC, and a whole industry built around it... and then, the scale of compromise.
There are lots of mitigation techniques for vulnerabilities like this (essentially, devices which are too fast-changing and too difficult to fully trust, but which have to touch sensitive data), but it's not as if people can carry around a firewall in their pocket these days, sadly.
I'm certainly re-generating any keys which touched iOS or OSX devices (thankfully very few), and reinstalling OSes, in the interim.
Lots of points in favor or against:
1) It's a huge compromise, and "open" to anyone to exploit, which would ultimately get caught and fixed faster. But it's also not targeting anything specific, so there's less of a signature of the attacker.
2) Incredibly simple, and thus a plausible mistake.
3) Hidden in plain sight
I'd generally come down on the side of "accident". The better question is if an systematic testing system for exploitable weaknesses (or a lucky chance finding) could find something like this (either a regression, or a badly implemented new feature) and exploit it -- basically assuming there are going to be errors in implementations. That's understood to be a standard technique in the IC, and a whole industry built around it... and then, the scale of compromise.
There are lots of mitigation techniques for vulnerabilities like this (essentially, devices which are too fast-changing and too difficult to fully trust, but which have to touch sensitive data), but it's not as if people can carry around a firewall in their pocket these days, sadly.
I'm certainly re-generating any keys which touched iOS or OSX devices (thankfully very few), and reinstalling OSes, in the interim.