Posted on 01/13/2020 7:23:50 PM PST by Theoria
Attorney General William P. Barr declared on Monday that a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla., was an act of terrorism, and he asked Apple in an unusually high-profile request to provide access to two phones used by the gunman.
Mr. Barr’s appeal was an escalation of a continuing fight between the Justice Department and Apple pitting personal privacy against public safety.
“This situation perfectly illustrates why it is critical that the public be able to get access to digital evidence,” Mr. Barr said, calling on technology companies to find a solution and complaining that Apple had provided no “substantive assistance.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Encryption was my job.
For Uncle Sam.
Actually, no, unlike the system used on bolt-on encryption, like Android’s, it doesn’t. Every time the passcode is entered, an algorithm is applied to it which compares the resulting coded key to a one-way hash. The passcode cannot be calculated from knowing the hash. If the algorithm’s result matches the hash stored in a location buried in the Secure Enclave, which is unreadable by the system’s processor, then that result will be passed on to another stored algorithm in the dedicated encryption engine processor be entangled with three other Secure Enclave stored pieces of data to create the actual encryption key to unlock the data.
So, no, none of the keys are ever stored on the device. They are generated as needed.. . . and kept in a locked special processor the system processor cannot read. Nor can that area be read from the outside. It’s buried deep in a six layer IC. Ergo, no search can ever find it. Locations are also randomized. Nice try.
Samsung’s vaunted Knox was found to keep its encryption keys in an unencrypted cleartext library where anyone could find them. This was discovered three weeks after they got certified for use by the US Military. ROTFLMAO!
Not on an iPhone. Both have to be alive to work. They just won’t respond to dead flesh for fingers, and for FaceID it requires an active eye contact of living eyes. Dead ones don’t react.
There’s a base algorithm and there’s a key.
The key changes.
Like in the old KW-26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KW-26
And if you know the base algorithm, a supercomputer can find the key.
Warrants compel one to provide something one has custody or possession of. They cannot compel something one does not have, or cannot provide. Apple cannot be compelled by a warrant to provide trade secrets, codes that are not germane to the crime. Apple is simply not a party to the action. They are not complicit. Apple does not hold the key to the encryption and cannot provide what they do not have.
If, and this is a big if, the terrorist enabled "unlock with my AppleID password” then Apple may be able to assist in unlocking the device. However, it’s unlikely the terrorist did that. Most users don’t.
You seem to think this is a simple cypher. It isn’t. Most financial institutions use 128bit AES as good enough for protecting billion dollar transactions in international transmission. This is 256bit AES. There simply is no universal key to unlocking these encrypted files. They have only one key. . . and that’s created and kept by the user, not Apple.
Thete is little security this side of heaven.
A judge should uphold the constitution, but they don’t always do so...
Apple will unlock your phone if you are willing to wait 10 days. It is possible, they just make you jump through some email hoops to do it.
>>even though they have already cleared the shooter of having any connections.
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3807871/posts
Breaking: Attorney General: Mass shooting by Saudi national was an act of terror
washingtonexaminer. ^ | 1/13/2020 | Jerry Dunleavy |
Posted on 1/13/2020, 1:24:37 PM by caww
Attorney General William Barr announced Monday the December mass shooting by a Saudi national that left three American sailors dead in Pensacola, Florida was an act of terrorism.
Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, a second lieutenant in the Royal Saudi Air Force, shot and killed three U.S. navy sailors — Ensign Joshua Kaleb Watson, 23, Airman Mohammed Haitham, 19, and Airman Apprentice Cameron Walters, 21 — and wounded at least eight others at the Naval Air Station Pensacola. Haitham and Walters received posthumous promotions, and Acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly praised them for displaying “the finest warrior ethos and quick decision-making that undoubtedly saved many lives.”
Barr said that “the evidence shows that the shooter was motivated by jihadist ideology.”
On Sept. 11, the Saudi national posted on social media that “the countdown has begun,” and over his Thanksgiving break, he visited the 9/11 memorial in New York City.
...”The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia gave complete and total support to our counterterrorism investigation,” Barr said. “They ordered all Saudi trainees to fully cooperate.” Barr said that during the investigation, “we did learn of derogatory material possessed by 21 Saudi trainees,” including 17 people who had shared “jihadi or anti-American content”...
...Alshamrani showed mass shooting videos during a dinner party the week of the shooting, and a Twitter account believed to belong to Alshamrani expressed extremist and stridently anti-American views, including a tweet which echoed Osama bin Laden: “The security is a shared destiny ... You will not be safe until we live it as reality in [Palestine] and American troops get out of our land.”...
Then you know nothing about encryption if you think encryption is based on prime numbers . . . This has absolutely nothing to do with export of data but rather with storage of encrypted data that has but a single key. It’s not going anywhere.
You’re talking about two, or more, -key encryption, like public/private encryption, which is another animal completely.
This is a lockbox 256bit AES Advanced Encryption System (AES) that uses a key with a one-way algorithm applied to the data. You cannot use the algorithm and the data to calculate the key.
The key itself is constructed from four separate pieces plus the passcode hash. Only two of which are at all possibly knowable.
The final part is the unknowable one-way hash constructed and stored in another location for comparison by one of several algorithms randomly selected and not recorded to be burned into the Encryption Engine processor in the Secure Enclave, but the one-way hash recalculated anew each time it’s entered and compared to unlock the device, then when it has passed the comparison, the stored one will be used to construct the key.
This original stored passcode hash will be entangled with the other pieces of the stored data in the Secure Enclave by another random algorithm burned into the encryption engine to create the actual encryption key that will be used by the dedicated encryption engine processor to encrypt and decrypt the data. This is done every time.
None of this key construction data or the proper algorithms are available off the device in the proper unknowable configuration, so even were one to transmit the raw encrypted data elsewhere, without the hardware in this particular iOS device, it could never be unlocked.
>>By the way, you -are- aware that apple cannot open someone’s device aren’t you? If they had such a backdoor, it would be no security at all.
I am aware that Apple bricked my phone because apparently I clicked the icloud button (which I never use and almost never use the itunes store). I shut my phone down and Apple locked my phone as a precautionary move.
Didn’t remember my itunes access info and Apple wouldn’t let me recover my info because it was blocking texts coming to my phone. Visit to the Apple store didn’t help.
Did the “Reset” password option where I had to wait out 10 days of busywork then they mailed my brother’s phone (or computer) a code which I was able to use to re-access my phone. And then I set a new itunes password.
F- Apple. They can reset it.
I saw it. Did you read my post? Did you grasp the sheer time required?
what part of we have no Supercomputer available today, not even hypothetically quantum computing, that could break a 256bit AES encryption.
The calculation I used when I came up with those numbers was based on the supercomputer capabilities of four years ago or so. . . And then I quadrupled them. . . , then I doubled them again. The times were for supercomputers that weren’t even on the drawing boards yet, and were were still talking about time frames that exceeded by three times the estimated half lives of sub atomic particles! By four and a half times the longest half-life of electrons.
No, Mariner, there are no supercomputers at Apple or the NSA that are working away cracking encryptions in a few weeks. The laws of mathematics don’t allow it. They are still chasing huge primes and trillionth decimals of pi hoping to find an ending. No, there isn’t going to be a magic algorithm that suddenly and simply breaks them by applying a thirteenth dimensional Fourier transformation of the nth iteration of the square root of -1. (Although I once saw a paper that postulated that all data a person could possibly need could be eventually compressed and encrypted down and stored in a single digit number. . . But, of course, it would require a really, really, really huge key!)
Agree, I’m sure it’s better today but it was very very good then. I just have a very good BS detector that has proven right very often. Ask yourself, how do we KNOW that phone was cracked? What proof do we have? If it only took a million bucks plus a week or so for a small foreign company to break in then why not secretly build the tools to open any phone and say nothing?
The NSA can break 256bit encryption easily? You might want to let them know as I’m sure they will be very interested. Unless of course your definition of easy is to fire up your handy super computer and let it run for a billion years or so.
No, they really did get into that Apple iPhone 5C. However, that was an older generation version technology running an older iOS as well, and it did not have the latest security such as the Secure Enclave technology that was introduced with the iPhone 5S and later.
The Israeli Company, Cellebrite, who bought he tech from a white hat hacker, and one other, Greykey, who also figured out how to do it, both started marketing the technology to police departments around the world for about $10,000 - $35,000 per unit depending on how many unlocking licenses they bought. They would unlock IPhone 5, 5c, 4, 4s, 3G and lower. They later improved their tech to unlock up to iPhone 7. I have not heard they’ve been able to unlock anything from iPhone 8, X, Xs, Xr, or 11 running iOS 13. Apple figured out what they were doing and closed the vulnerability door.
Uh. No. I know some of the people who supply the NSA supercomputers and the answer is still, no.
You want to break the laws of math. . . and think that government bureaucrats can do better than what can be done in research labs. BS! You’ve been watching too many movies.
You’re talking about a different issue entirely. Not what this is. You had an alternative contact, your brother. That may not be the case with this device. What you’re talking about is based on your AppleID. It was still active. They just needed to reset your AppleID and provide you with what they set it to. This guy may not have an active one.
Apple volunteered to unlock the San Bernardino terrorist’s IPhone 5C but they were rebuffed by the FBI agent in charge and the San Bernardino County Health Department IT guy who said we don’t need you, we’re gonna do it ourselves. Apple was going to do what they did for you, use the known AppleID, give it a new temporary passcode, use it to unlock the iPhone, then let you make the passcode what you wanted. But the FBI agent and the IT guy proceeded to change the AppleID and the Passcode, using the IT guy’s corporate Apple management tools, locking the iPhone up completely, and they didn’t write down either the new AppleID or passcode, which was the wrong way to go about it, but now, no access at all. Oops! A little knowledge screws up a lot. Apple could have had it unlocked in ten minutes. . . and had volunteered.
It’s either that or admit the NSA has records of everything ever transmitted or received from that phone (and yours too!).
They also would rather destroy Apple than admit they can crack the encrypted data. I bet muscling or suborning Signal and WhatsApp is far less difficult than Apple.
But that doesn’t have the intimidation factor, the chilling effect, that a brutal public takedown of a multi-industry giant would have on a small niche business to knuckle under to the Almighty Government.
In a just world that would leave a mark...
They had every bit and byte that was ever sent to or from that phone. They've long since suborned WhatsApp and Signal.
They can't admit it.
$1,000,000.00 is a very cheap price for a fig leaf.
Especially if it comes out of the taxpayers' pockets and not your own.
I didn’t have an alternate contact on my phone.
I did have my itunes active computer. It didn’t matter (even with my account being open).
I did have access to my email account associated with my phone. It didn’t matter.
I even had my number code to unlock my phone and the phone in my posession. It didn’t matter.
I made an in person visit to an apple store. It didn’t matter.
I made an online request to rest my account access and they sent a warning message to my email account saying that it would be handed over to the requesting alternate entity if I did nothing to stop it.
My brother’s contact was only provided well after this final step. With no verification that it was the phone owner making the request.
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