Your first-order estimate is not in fact good enough to provide a plausibly correct answer; you're not even in the ballpark of correct. The challenges facing reversers are in fact degrees different than those facing Apple itself, with its access to original source code; they are not entirely different kinds of challenges. And in neither case can the challenge be measured in "compiled image bytes reviewed per second".
Your arguments here pile non sequitur atop non sequitur. I'm left with the impression that this is a topic in which you've decided you're unwilling to concede anything. No doubt, if I challenged you about how difficult it is to reverse hardware, you'd pull some other weird rabbit out of your hat, like quantum states or interactions between circuits and cosmic rays.
Of course, if you'd led off your argument with "cosmic rays make all of information security in some ways unknowable", we'd all have simply said "sure, but that's besides the point". But that's not your argument. Your argument is that telcos should provide cryptographic security for telephone users, because Apple has insurmountable advantages against its users due to its access to its own source code. No, that doesn't make any sense.
I'm not taking it personally or anything. You've just gone on tilt. It happens to all of us. For what it's worth: I think you still share a Slack with several of us? You could ask this question there, and I'd be more comfortable responding in detail there.
I've already conceded that I am ignorant of many of the details of modern reverse-engineering techniques, so that is manifestly untrue.
> you're not even in the ballpark of correct
You keep saying that, and yet you don't back this up with any details or supporting arguments. In what way am I incorrect? Is my estimate too high? Too low? By how much? Am I wrong when I claim that a lower bound on the computational complexity of auditing is O(n)? If so, what is the correct result? Is it O(sqrt(n))? O(log(n))? O(1)?
BTW, I would actually love to be convinced that I'm wrong about this. That would be a huge two-fold win for me. It would mean that 1) I can stop worrying about security (as long as I use an iPhone) and 2) I would learn something new and almost certainly very interesting. But you (or someone) have to tell me how and why I am wrong, not just that I am wrong.
It would also help if you would stop stop advancing logical fallacies like this straw man:
> cosmic rays make all of information security in some ways unknowable
I don't understand why you're more comfortable discussing this on Slack, but OK, I've fired up my Slack client.
I don't want to pretend that there's a meaningful relationship between image size and reversing challenge, but to the extent there is, it's something more like O(log n).
Your arguments here pile non sequitur atop non sequitur. I'm left with the impression that this is a topic in which you've decided you're unwilling to concede anything. No doubt, if I challenged you about how difficult it is to reverse hardware, you'd pull some other weird rabbit out of your hat, like quantum states or interactions between circuits and cosmic rays.
Of course, if you'd led off your argument with "cosmic rays make all of information security in some ways unknowable", we'd all have simply said "sure, but that's besides the point". But that's not your argument. Your argument is that telcos should provide cryptographic security for telephone users, because Apple has insurmountable advantages against its users due to its access to its own source code. No, that doesn't make any sense.
I'm not taking it personally or anything. You've just gone on tilt. It happens to all of us. For what it's worth: I think you still share a Slack with several of us? You could ask this question there, and I'd be more comfortable responding in detail there.