Over the last few years, Apple has built a reputation for being strong on user privacy. Its marketing likes to emphasize this point often as a way of distinguishing the company from its competitors.
Interestingly though, a new discovery reveals that the just-released M4 iPad Pro includes a new security feature that Apple hasn’t told anyone about.
Your microphone and camera indicators are more secure
As discovered by Guilherme Rambo, Apple’s M4 iPad Pro comes with a security enhancement that relates to the microphone and camera light indicators.
Fun fact about the M4 iPad Pro: it’s the first device to support and use Apple’s new Secure Indicator Light (SIL) mechanism. When using the microphone or camera, the corresponding indicator dot is effectively rendered in hardware, making it a lot less likely that any malware or user space app would be able to access those sensors without the user’s knowledge.
Apple first introduced the microphone and camera light indicators—the little orange and green dots that appear when those sensors are in use—back in fall 2020 with iOS 14.
These indicators were intended to increase user awareness of when an app might be listening in or taking video, all in an effort to dissuade bad actors from leveraging an iPhone’s hardware without user consent.
While those indicators historically have been tied to software triggers, the new Secure Indicator Light of the M4 iPad Pro appears to make the system even more secure by tying its control to hardware components.
New feature made possible by Secure Exclave
Rambo first uncovered the existence of a new ‘Secure Exclave’ as part of the M4 chip a couple weeks ago, but until today it was unclear what all this security component made possible. Now, it seems, one function at least is to prevent any tampering from happening with the microphone and camera indicator lights. Thus ensuring they work as intended and no malicious apps can circumvent them.
Currently the new iPad Pro is the only device to contain this new security protocol, but it will almost certainly make its way to the iPhone 16 Pro’s A18 chip and to M4 Mac models later this year.
In the meantime, perhaps Apple isn’t mentioning the feature publicly because it would indicate, inadvertently, that the existing microphone and camera indicators in all other hardware aren’t as secure as they could be.
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