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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

> The Neo doesn’t have a hardware indicator light for the camera. The indication for “camera in use” is only in the menu bar. There’s a privacy/security implication for this omission. According to Apple, the hardware indicator light for camera-in-use on MacBooks, iPhones, and iPads cannot be circumvented by software. If the camera is on, that light comes on, and no software can disable it. Because the Neo’s only camera-in-use indicator is in the menu bar, that seems obviously possible to circumvent via software.

iPhone and iPad does not have a hardware indicator light

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There is a ton of fascinating work to make the "software" camera in use indicator just as secure if not more secure than an LED attached to the power lines of the camera. Apple hasn't publicly talked about it much but here are two sources that aren't terrible.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09272 https://randomaugustine.medium.com/on-apple-exclaves-d683a2c... https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/19/on-apple-exclav...

We've seen a few examples on HN lately (Coruna iOS Exploit Kit) of nation state level exploits in the hands of financially motivated organizations. I'm not free of bias here but the industry is quickly headed towards a reckoning in terms of security over the next few years.

Minus an intentionally bad hardware design, I struggle to imagine how a software version of the idea could ever be more secure than a power line hard-wired to an LED.

You build it directly into the GPU firmware and don't give the operating system any access to it.

> You build it directly into the GPU firmware and don't give the operating system any access to it.

State-level actors have been know to fiddle with firmware, specifically in the past for hard drives:

* https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13534...

* https://www.wired.com/2015/02/nsa-firmware-hacking/

I could see how cameras and microphones could be enticing targets.

That is still a blackbox code implementation which could be updated at any time. I trust wires, not programmers.

The firmware could be flashed to the device in factory and then write-protected by burning a fuse in the circuit.

This is not the case.

I mean, we don't really have any indication that the MacBook camera light is hard wired into anything.

For those who are interested, you can disassemble/image the assembly and see there is no funny business. People have done it. If there is something more complex than a power line, something is afoot.

I have no way of interrogating some GPU firmware.

I still don’t see how this could be more secure than connecting the LED to the camera’s power lines.

I'm pretty sure the Apple dev who was tasked with securing the older hardware "tally lamps" is on HN somewhere -- I seem to remember him posting about it. (is it you?)

I used to know a guy, about 15 years ago, who made his money exclusively through buying up laptops and hacking the tally lamp code (to stop it activating) one-by-one and selling the code directly to 3LAs. It was really good money.

No, I was not in the industry at the time :)

I am well aware of that work and the result is not more secure than power lines turning the LED on.

It's possible that they use the camera to measure room brightness

I thought this too. If they're using the camera to do brightness, it needs to be on when the user isn't using it - if the activity LED is tied to the camera power rail (not sure if it is), it might look like there's something nefarious going on. No way Apple would let that go out the door.

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/mac-on-screen-camer... > MacBook Neo combines system software and dedicated silicon elements within A18 Pro to provide additional security for the camera feed. The architecture is designed to prevent any untrusted software—even with root or kernel privileges in macOS—from engaging the camera without also visibly lighting the on-screen camera indicator light.

Huh. I hadn't digested the iphone indicator was also software based only.

But it's not like hardware indicators are foolprof, even apple has suffered hardware based circunvent via firmware: https://appleinsider.com/articles/13/12/18/researchers-find-...

I guess for Neos it's back to the good old postit.

Arguably with SIP a hardware indicator light is not strictly necessary, the OS could force the indicator pixels to be lit.

Isn't the argument that a hardware indicator light is (more) immune to bugs? If its just software, you're a software exploit/bug away from finding a way to access the sensor without tripping the software light.

Yes but also this has never been an issue on any phones (i.e. never heard a complaint), and you take that to the toilet. By comparison a laptop camera has much less access to your private life.

People who are truly worried about cameras will cover it regardless of indicator.

I might be mis-remembering but wasn't Pegasus spyware able to bypass the camera indicator? Or was the issue that journalists were constantly seeing the light appear for no reason. I believe it was one of those.

Pegasus is primarily a mobile spyware toolkit and iPhone does not have a hardware light

This depends on how the light is implemented -- if it's implemented in the camera module itself it's pretty bulletproof, but i would bet it's just a gpio to the processor on most of these devices and controlled by the os anyway. I could be wrong about that, but I err on the side of caution. I keep my phone in a bag most of the time.

Treat every gun as if it's loaded, and every camera as if it's filming.

On modern Apple devices, the HW indicator light is wired directly between the power rail of the camera module and ground. Turning the camera on via software energizes the power rail. The only way that the camera is on and the led is not is if the led has burned out.

This is a "nothing-up-my-sleeves" implementation, it's not really possible to hide anything weird in the complexity. Apple clearly didn't just want a light that's always on when the camera is on, they wanted an implementation where they can point to it and clearly prove that the light is always on if the camera is on.

That's going to be a problem for the education market though.

Why?

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