Re:iMessage for Windows: A labor of love that will never see...
by saagarjha on Thursday June 04, 2020 @05:30AM
(#23414468)
I doubt anyone will argue that it’s easier to find exploits in closed-source code, but it’s really not that much more difficult. Like, maybe an order of magnitude harder at most. To a nation-state, does it really matter that a zero day chain costs $100,000 rather than $1,000,000?
Your argument that somehow Apple will do better than these black hat guys is also flawed. Apple can higher N security experts but Apple will always unlikely to match in number of firms and state agencies who can hire M >> N in aggregate. Think of Apple running centralize effort with N people while whole world running distributed attack every day every hour with 10X more eyes and time on hand. Also it has been very well understood within security professionals that source code gets far more scruitiny from black hat then white hat guys.
Finally, remember that people don't update their systems for months and even years. You should know that Bezos iPhone was hacked by an exploit developed by a black hat firm which ultimately cost him $40B in divorce. Think about that for a second. A single software vunerability cost was $40 billion, more than market cap of many companies and GDPs of many countries. This is a guy who literally owns huge chunk of public and private infrastructure, has the best of the best security experts at his finger tips and he got hacked.