{"id":29782,"date":"2020-08-17T14:54:53","date_gmt":"2020-08-17T18:54:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=29782"},"modified":"2020-08-19T14:42:04","modified_gmt":"2020-08-19T18:42:04","slug":"the-case-of-the-top-secret-ipod","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2020\/08\/17\/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ipod\/","title":{"rendered":"The Case of the Top Secret iPod"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/tidbits.com\/2020\/08\/17\/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ipod\/\">David Shayer<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/tidbits.com\/2020\/08\/17\/the-case-of-the-top-secret-ipod\/\">\n<p>They didn&rsquo;t actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy.  They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod&rsquo;s disk in a way that couldn&rsquo;t be easily detected. But it still had to look and work like a normal iPod.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Finally, the iPod team developed on Windows computers. Apple didn&rsquo;t have working ARM developer tools yet, because this was before the iPhone shipped. The iPod team used ARM developer tools from ARM Ltd, which ran only on Windows and Linux.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>We discussed the best way to hide the data they recorded. As a disk engineer, I suggested they make another partition on the disk to store their data. That way, even if someone plugged the modified iPod into a Mac or PC, iTunes would treat it as a normal iPod, and it would look like a normal iPod in the Mac Finder or Windows Explorer. They liked that, and a hidden partition it was.<\/p>\n<p>[&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p>Starting with the iPod nano, the operating system was signed with a digital signature to block the Linux hackers (and others). The boot ROM checked the digital signature before loading the operating system; if it didn&rsquo;t match, it wouldn&rsquo;t boot.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n<p id=\"the-case-of-the-top-secret-ipod-update-2020-08-19\">Update (2020-08-19): See also: <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=24212520\">Hacker<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=24188791\">News<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>David Shayer: They didn&rsquo;t actually work for the Department of Energy; they worked for a division of Bechtel, a large US defense contractor to the Department of Energy. They wanted to add some custom hardware to an iPod and record data from this custom hardware to the iPod&rsquo;s disk in a way that couldn&rsquo;t be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-08-17T18:54:56Z","apple_news_api_id":"6b055694-0dad-49d1-954d-ee9268af4bc8","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-08-19T18:42:12Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AawVWlA2tSdGVTe6SaK9LyA","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[262,466,295,792],"class_list":["post-29782","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-arm","tag-codesigning","tag-history","tag-ipod"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29782"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29782\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29814,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29782\/revisions\/29814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}