BlastDoor for Messages and IDS

Devices with iOS 14, iPadOS 14, macOS 11, watchOS 7, or later include a security feature called BlastDoor. The goal of BlastDoor is to help protect the system by corralling attackers—increasing the complexity of their efforts to exploit Messages and Apple Identity Services (IDS). BlastDoor isolates, parses, transcodes, and validates untrusted data arriving in Messages, IDS and other vectors to help prevent attacks.

BlastDoor does this by employing sandbox restrictions and memory safe validation of output which creates a significant obstacle for attackers to overcome before reaching other parts of the operating system. It’s designed to drastically improve user protection against attacks, particularly “0-click” attacks—those that don’t require user interaction.

Finally, Messages treats traffic from known senders differently than traffic from unknown senders, offering a different set of functionality to each group and segmenting known versus unknown data into distinct BlastDoor instances.