I'm sure you know this, but deliberately committing an act of espionage to directly or indirectly subvert the activities of government agencies would be a silly thing for Apple to try to do.
Their dollars are better spent on lobbying (make shit like this illegal), and engineering (make shit like this literally not work because iPhone is as secure as it can be).
What I mean is: making software like this for sale to the highest bidder should not be something a company is able to do legally.
It should be as bizarre as the idea of incorporating a business in the US specifically, and publicly, to rob banks or commit securities fraud.
I disagree. There ahould be nothing inherently illegal about owning, making or selling such software to an entity that can legally use it. (I would assume any country employing such software would indemnify there agents using it against foreign adversaries).
Not that I like it, and as a private citizen, I dont like thw prospect of being spied on, even though I have nothing to hide.
To stop it, I think you'd need to take a step back into the 90s and early 2000s and classify such programs as munitions and restrict export (not that all offerings are from US countries).
Have just read your answer and I totally see your point! I don't agree but it's definitely a judgement call.
Perhaps this would be a better way of expressing my position (with a few simplifications of the current situation):
1/ It seems morally wrong for it to be possible for an American company to buy spyware which exploits security vulnerabilities in another American company's software. The act of exploiting those vulnerabilities is illegal in the United States and against the terms of service of the software developer. The outcome of the exploitation (mass clandestine collection of user data without any permissioning) is also illegal.
2/ The US government could solve this by making it illegal for US companies to use the software, outright. They and other nations could also solve or diminish the issue for foreign nations by precluding private companies within their jurisdiction from building commercial propositions around these vulnerabilities. So both a ban on domestic "import" of the product, and a ban on "export" too.
3/ Clearly government agencies need and will continue to produce and procure software like this in the same way as they need to produce and procure military-grade assault weapons, surface-to-air missiles, and stealth bombers. The production, trafficking, and purchase of these items is highly regulated and tightly controlled: I cannot simply start manufacturing firearms because I have the equipment! This regulation is in part a means of preventing widespread availability of dangerous items getting into the hands of consumers and bad actors.
4/ At the very least, the same ought to apply here: an infosec company wishing to auction exploits or sell spyware SaaS should have to be very tightly regulated by the state, and should be unable to sell any of its products or services to any domestic or foreign entity without state approval — a QUANGO of sorts.
I wouldn’t be surprised if everything that NSO does depends on just one or two extremely good exploits. Once Apple rolls out an update to patch the one or two critical bugs, it’ll stop NSO for a nice long time until they spend hundreds of man years or millions of dollars to find another exploit that’s just as good.
1. How big will the project be? I.E. what staff you need to develop AND deploy honeypot phones.
2. Who would decide targets?
3. What do you do with the data collected? Who enforces those rules?
4. How do you keep the project secret?
5. How do you prevent various 3 letter agencies from ordering you to deploy this technology for national security?
6. How do you protect Apple's reputation once it leaks out that there are secret phones that eavesdrop on you?
A better long term strategy is to offer large bug/exploit bounties. This foils malware and builds trust in Apple platform.
APTs are not exactly a new thing. On windows you get endpoint security software that logs excessive telemetry to a place threat hunters of security companies can search to find exploitation or infection attempts.
The honeypot phones would behave exactly like normal phones but save all incoming data at the lowest protocol layer (whether by wifi, cellular, Lightning connector, and maybe even in-circuit attempts to reflash firmware) to hidden internal terabyte microSD storage, which it would later exfiltrate back to Apple at some point —- perhaps by even having a second hidden cellular connection. I’m assuming that Apple has all the talent it needs to reverse engineer and plug the NSO malware once it has an actual copy of the malware.