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Comment by trangus_1985 | Hacker News Reader

trangus_1985

If you're not familiar with it, their platform security team releases a whitepaper about the technical details of their security. Regardless of how you feel about Apple, these documents are incredibly well done and interesting to read. The Find My section may have more information, as will their contract tracing docs (which use a riff of the same technology)

https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing

I highly recommend anyone interested in security or privacy to read this from start to finish:

https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...

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Unfortunately that document mentions the AOP just once, only confirming its existence. It doesn't actually describe what it does.

They do yearly updates, the 2022 doc will very likely have more information. Regardless, the 2021 doc has some key foundations of the technology that are worth knowing.

The contract tracing docs _should_ be almost the same technology, and knowing how that works _should_ be a good start. At least, from my eyeing the OP's article as a lay person.

AOP has been a thing since iPhone 6s, so they're not particularly rushed in documenting it.

I can't go too into details, but now that the AOP is doing cryptographical operations and key escrow, the internal bus is likely to show up in future documents. Maybe not the AOP but certainly the mechanisms it uses to interact with the find my network. It may also be a separate find my network whitepaper.

Is the AOP still involved in Find My, even on a 6s/6s Plus?

Edit: I read the TFA, which says 11 and up.

I certainly hope so!

"They do yearly updates, the 2022 doc will very likely have more information."

Sure you document such stuff before releasing it?

> Sure you document such stuff before releasing it?

Uuuhh so, bad news. Basically nobody ever does that. Since agile, everyone seems to just iterate like mad, release, then document after release if you have time.

I'm as guilty of this as everyone else.

>Sure you document such stuff before releasing it?

These are all likely documented internally - the process of cleaning it up is probably something they only care to do once a year. Very little of this affects most developers, and the stuff that does is available in the dev docs.

Apple doesn't even always document stuff after releasing it.

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