iOS 10 Beta Released With Unencrypted Kernel

Tom Simonite:

Why Apple has suddenly opened up its code is unclear. One hypothesis in the security community is that, as Levin puts it, someone inside the company “screwed up royally.” But he and Solnik both say there are reasons to think it may have been intentional. Encouraging more people to pore over the code could result in more bugs being disclosed to Apple so that it can fix them.

Jonathan Zdziarski, another iOS security expert, favors that hypothesis, because accidentally forgetting to encrypt the kernel would be such an elementary mistake. “This would have been an incredibly glaring oversight, like forgetting to put doors on an elevator,” he says.