I was only providing an example for pcapd rather than all of the items he is classing as backdoors. The entire slide is:
Maybe for Developers for Debugging? No.
- Actual developer tools live on the developer image, and are only available when Developer Mode is enabled
- Xcode does not provide a packet sniffing interface for developers
- Developers don’t need to bypass backup encryption
- Developers don’t need access to such sensitive content
- Apple wants developers to use the SDK APIs to get data
- There are no docs to tell developers about these “features”
To me all those points seem to be provided to systematically deny legitimate uses for pcapd, which is contrary to the blog entry where he states, "I mentioned in my talk that pcapd has many legitimate uses". However it's entirely possible I'm reading it wrong.
As I mentioned, there is good information in there. Adding extra, potentially misleading. fluff is unnecessary and counter-productive to my mind. That's just my opinion though.
Since I no longer work for the company, i'll mention that I've worked with the team at Apple that used pcapd in the iphone. It was an extremely valuable tool for finding/testing issues.
As I mentioned, there is good information in there. Adding extra, potentially misleading. fluff is unnecessary and counter-productive to my mind. That's just my opinion though.