&gt;vulnerability (a backdoor)<p>This is at best imprecise. The HN privacy advocates have taken to calling all vulnerabilities backdoors on the (not insane) belief that manufacturers are out to get them, but there is a distinction.<p>Backdoors are a special case of vulnerabilities inserted <i>intentionally</i> by an attacker into ostensibly secure designs to allow the attacker back in once the device has left his control. For example, if Apple configured iPhones to accept <i>two</i> PINs, one set by the user and the other set by Apple at manufacturing time, we could say the iPhone is backdoored. If some engineer went rouge and marked his <i>own</i> code signing key as trusted, that&#x27;s a backdoor.<p>When you say something is a backdoor, you assign blame for its actively malicious and undisclosed insertion. Either the organization is evil or someone subverted the organization, and this person must be caught and punished.<p>Most vulnerabilities happen because their creators didn&#x27;t know better, or found mitigation to be not worth the cost. Apple is a little bit extraordinary in considering &quot;itself, under legal coercion&quot; under its threat model at all.<p>You might disguise a backdoor as an ordinary accidental vulnerability, and this is a reasonable assertion to throw around when someone <i>who should have known better, whose peers were doing better</i> chose an insecure design. i.e. Juniper switching their design to use known-broken cryptography.<p>The signs here certainly point to a vulnerability that ought to be mitigated (and possibly has been under the Secure Element system), but not a deliberate flaw in iOS&#x27;s design. Vulnerability, not backdoor.