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 ...
My biggest feature request on iPhones is a wipe password. You would essentially have 2 passwords. One to unlock, one to wipe. Enter the wrong one and the game is over. You can guess which one I'd be freely willing to give to FedGov.
So are you are saying that you cant unlock an apple phone if it’s not connected?
Uh, that's not true. They are using a publicly known algorithm. AES256 is well known, and well researched. As Swordmaker has commented upthread, the 'key' itself is not actually stored on the device. A hash of it is. That hash is a one-way mathematical function. It cannot be reversed. No supercomputer extant today can crack it in anything less than the heat death of the universe. If they could, that would mean that the cryptographic algorithm had been fundamentally compromised. That's why we use these algorithms and functions. They are, to the best of our knowledge, absolutely secure short of brute-force cracking, which iPhones attempt to defeat through hardware. (i.e., you only get 10 tries before the hash is wiped.) Even if Fedgov can get around that limitation, I'm perfectly willing to let them churn away on it with all available computational resources until the sun expands into a gas giant and swallows the Earth.
I've had an interest in cryptography since Phil Zimmerman released PGP a couple of decades ago. None of the math of this is rocket science. Implementation of it sometimes can be, which is why Apple goes to as much trouble as it does to isolate the crypto from the phone itself. Personally, I think they do a pretty good job of it. Better than Google has with Android, mainly because Apple has total control over both hardware and software, which is something Google does not have.
As I said, the implementation of the cryptographic protocols, can be pretty difficult, especially against a determined adversary like FedGov. There are known hacks against older iPhones. Each time a work-around is found, Apple attempts to mitigate on their next models, as they should.
Uh, I'd like one of those computers that are made of something other than matter, run on something other than energy, and extend into other universes.
Always accuse the other person of what you are doing, like all democrats do.
If you read what Cook actually provided instead of what Barr said they did, you might be more informed. Barr is the guy who believed every word of the jail crew that killed Epstein but lies about Cook/Apple. Go figure.
No, the hash code is on the device in the Secure Enclave. It cannot be accessed from outside the device because even the iOS device’s own system processor has no connection to that memory area at all. Only the dedicated Encryption Engine processor can access it for specific purposes.
The Encryption Engine’s processor in the Secure Enclave can request specific inputs from the System processor, such as the necessary environmental sensor data for creating part of the encryption key, and receive input from the virtual keyboard when the system is locked or in change passcode mode. Otherwise, the input and output is hardware limited to what it can do. There is no connection on the logic board at all where the data in the Secure Enclave can be accessed at all.
It sounds as if you got connected to the department of dirty tricks rather than the Fairy Godmother department. It doesn’t sound like Apple’s usual approach to service to me.
Comey can get FISA warrant using a political corrupt lie filed dossier, but we cannot get apple to open a phone of a known terrorist.
What’s wrong with this picture when terrorists have more rights than innocent civilians?
Have you ever gone through the process?
It didnt make me feel safer or secure. Only inconvenienced for two weeks.
You’ve actually got a point there. When you use a technique to gain access to a technological device, the defense is entitled to access to that technique, in all details, including the technology, so they can challenge how it was done. Some things must remain a secret. That is one of the reasons why Apple will not unlock individual phones.
A couple decades ago, a pedophile murderer was thought to keep his files on a Blackberry phone. The prosecutors convinced RIMM, because of the heinous nature of the crime, to break with their previous policy to unlock the previously inviolate Blackberry security and allow the evidence to be used against the defendant. The judge in the case, in response to a defense pleading, ordered Blackberry to reveal to the defense’s IT specialist under court seal, how the Blackberry was protected and how it was unlocked, so they could consider if it was in someway useful for the defense.
The defense’s teenage IT specialist, against the court ordered seal, made copies of the unlocking technique (Gee, who could have guessed), and shared it with some of his buddies!
If that was not bad enough with the techniques now out in the hacker and scammer communities, after the trial and conviction, the idiot judge, in response to petitions from the media, citing Freedom of the press. open trials, and the right of the people to know, unsealed everything in the case, including the RIMM proprietary data! So much for RIMM’s vaunted security that was what made it special enough that governments were buying and using their Blackberry products. RIMM had to go back and completely re-invent its security and privacy using a completely different paradigm.
I don't think I have what you are after as I'm not the OP. Maybe try the OP to see if he can help. Sorry!
Probably on Amazon now!
Where did I say that? I specifically stated that the one-way hash is kept in a Secure Enclave on the device. Nowhere did I say anything about requiring a connection to unlock the device. There is nothing about Apple security that is ever sent to the cloud unless the user decided to use iCloud. Even then nothing about the device security is ever sent to iCloud. ZIP, nada, nothing.
The Secure Enclave is part of the A13 Bionic SoC (System on a Chip) which includes the System Processor, the Encryption Engine which includes the Secure Enclave, Graphics Processing Units, Neural Engine, and other ICs, all incorporated into a single 8.5 billion transistor Integrated Chip. The passcode one-way comparison hash is kept somewhere in a randomized EPROM memory location inside a Secure Enclave inside the Encryption Engine in the A13 Bionic SoC, not on the cloud.
Incidentally, that specific A13 Bionic SoC is hardware registered to other components inside that specific iOS device. It cannot be pulled out and just stuck in another iOS device and work without being registered to those other components, and vice verse. This is more of the security iOS devices offer to keep the user’s data safe.
Looks like that should have been directed to PIF. Apologies
I’ve often thought that would be a great idea. . . But then they’d likely charge you with obstruction of justice. You can’t win. LOL!
Now what might be good would be a way is that if you looked at the iPhone with a certain expression, say you just dud a quick double blink while unlocking it THAT would erase it or just a specific data area you want protected. Then you can look at them with a blank stare and say, “gee, I don’t know what happened, it just went blank! Talk to Apple.” Or, in the latter case, just relax, you’re protected.
When. Since you linked to a computer from 1966, I suspect that might be when you were doing it.
Yes, I actually have with a client I helped who tried to put in a complex passcode and promptly forgot exactly what he entered. It took about two hours with an up scaling of tech support at Apple on 1-800-MY-APPLE. We got connected with the Fairy Godmother Department who used his AppleID to unlock it. . . But he had activated that feature. It then took some time for the encryption to be redone using the new passcode.
I’m sorry. I’ve said too much already that I cannot defend.
That’s OK, all of us have at one time or another gotten ourselves into that position. It’s all good.
So you have never gone the waiting period route but dispute my account
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