dual display adapters) that Apple to this day have not announced or endorsed a competitor to, and in fact those same companies (e.g. These third party devices that Apple blocked were not just enclosures, there were other TB3 devices (e.g. They didn't start blocking anything in particular 'shortly' before they announced this dev kit at all. These third party blocks have been in place since the first Thunderbolt 3 Mac launched.

don't run macbooks that are 6 years old, I guess. On anything before that, though, and DMA attacks could own you. Got a source for VT-d being supported on MacBooks? I've been looking pretty hard to find a definitive answer, but all I can find are random unverified forum posts, stackoverflow questions, blackhat presentations, etc, and all of them say that VT-d and IOMMU are not supported/enabled on recent MacBooks and MB Pros.Įdit: I finally came across the below link from Apple which does seem to imply that IOMMU VT-d is enabled on Macs that are 2012 and newer. Most of them actually specifically require that Thunderbolt security features be turned off because otherwise signed drivers are required to be installed before the peripheral will even connect. This is essentially one of the core messages you should take away from the field of hardware security.Įvery source that I can find regarding the 2016 DMA vulnerabilities disagrees with you. For devices that aren’t designed to resist emulation, which thunderbolt devices generally aren’t, it’s trivial.

Even for devices that are designed with the express purpose of being hard to emulate (auth tokens, DRM chips, iPhone cables), it’s at most a simple matter of a grad student or Shenzhen resident with access to a fume hood and an electron microscope finding some burned-in private keys.

T3 security enabler for mac