Apple Security PING!
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Posted on 01/16/2020 5:02:28 AM PST by DTAD
Apple and the US government are at loggerheads for the second time in four years over unlocking iPhones connected to a mass shooting, reviving debate over law enforcement access to encrypted devices.
Attorney General Bill Barr said Monday that Apple failed to provide "substantive assistance" in unlocking two iPhones in the investigation into the December shooting deaths of three US sailors at a Florida naval station, which he called an "act of terrorism."
(Excerpt) Read more at defencetalk.com ...
Apple needs to hold firm.
There are often vulnerabilities that later allow breaking into an unpatched phone.
Why should they?
Way back when George W Bush was pushing The Patriot Act, some folks thought that was a dangerous thing. A step too far. I admit, I was not one of those people. It seemed to me that maybe we needed the Patriot Act. We wanted to beat the terrorists, didn't we? Well, I was wrong. Clearly, the government got too much power and used that power to spy on citizens.
Bill Barr is a disappointment to me.
The last time this occurred, didn’t they just take the IPhone to some outfit in Israel who decoded it promptly.
>>Apple needs to hold firm.
As I understand it, it isn’t a matter of holding firm, it’s that they literally do not have a back door into their systems. They are being asked to do something they cannot do.
If you believe the government used the NSA to spy on the Trump campaign, then there is no reason to support Barr’s request to unlock phones.
Here’s what I think, Mr. Barr.
If you don’t want to be locked out of terrorists’ phones after they’ve terrorized, THEN STOP INVITING TERRORISTS INTO THE COUNTRY!
SEEMS PRETTY DAMNED SIMPLE!
Same here. At the time I thought the Patriot act sounded like a good idea. Wrong big time. The Bushes were a disaster for this country, both of them.
I believe Barr is pushing apple for the SAME reason and that is to expand government power and set precedent. Barr is a deep stater, through and through. Two damaged iphones from terrorists is not a reason to go public with this issue demanding apple compromise every iphone and expose all Americans to even more government intrusion.
The single biggest threat to America is our own government. Government power must be whole sale rolled back decades asap.
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Yes.
It was a model 6 versions back that still had a design flaw making it vulnerable to a very expensive attack.
Any “oh just do X and you can get in” is a flaw which must be fixed ASAP.
Presumably Apple has fixed it.
Security with a back door isn’t security.
As I understand it, it isn’t a matter of holding firm, it’s that they literally do not have a back door into their systems.
- -
Bingo. There is no “backdoor” in a good encryption algorithm.
Not promptly. It took about six months after the terrorist incident in San Bernardino, and four months after they gave up trying through the courts to get Apple to do what it turned out was illegal to try and force Apple to do. . . which was to create an entirely new iOS without the security that could be loaded onto any iOS device and unlock it, and then turn it over to the FBI. This would have basically destroyed Apple’s security business model for all iPhones, iPads, etc., around the world.
An All Writs court order cannot be used to require that. . . and in fact cannot be used to require anyone to do something that is outside of their normal course of business. I.E., an All Writs court order cannot compel a butcher to be a doctor because a butcher does not do medicine. Apple was not in the business of creating and selling custom operating systems, so could not be compelled to do so. It also could not be compelled to create one that would damage its primary business. SCOTUS has ruled TWICE before on such misuse of the All Writs court orders, slapping down inferior courts for such mis-application. Another example was that an All Writs order could be used to allow law enforcement to go through your house to gain access to your miscreant neighbors property, but it could NOT order you to tear down your house to provide them access.
There were a lot of people trying to find a way to hack into iPhones during that period. A white-hat hacker found a way to do it and sold his method for a huge chunk of change to a company called Cellebrite in Israel. The amount I heard was north of $500,000. Cellebrite turned around and offered to unlock the terrorist’s iPhone 5C for the FBI for an undisclosed fee. . . Which later turned out to be $1,000,000. That was in early June. Seven months after the attack.
It turned out there was nothing of evidentiary value on that iPhone, which I had predicted months earlier because the terrorists had not destroyed it. The two terrorists HAD destroyed two burner phones and two laptop computers and thrown the smashed parts into a lake before they went to a Christmas party and gunned down one of terrorist’s’ co-workers. My reasoning that there would not be anything dispositive on the iPhone 5C, besides it wasn’t smashed, was based on it not belonging to him. It was his employer’s iPhone. For a proper Islamic terrorist to reach his 72 virgins, he would have to be ritually clean, and sinless, in other words, have no Islamic sin. Theft would be such a sin, even if killing his non-Islamic co-workers was not. Destroying the employer’s iPhone or even using it for non-work purposes, would be theft, a sin, so I reasoned, there would be nothing on it except work related calls. That’s exactly what they found.
The only phone calls they found on it that were not strictly work, and even they could be construed as work related were a couple that were messages to his wife of “I’m going to be late getting home because I have to work late.”
Put simply:
To unlock the phone (were it configured securely), you have to guess the correct 77-digit prime number.
And you have 10 tries.
The San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone was a 5C, not a 6. . . And it did have the older security system, not the Secure Enclave. That was started with the 5S.
LOL! If that were the case, it would probably be easy. Given the way Prime Numbers work, there likely is only one of two 77-digit prime numbers. . . The real problem is that you can have any one of all the 77-digit numbers as your key, not just a prime, in 256bit AES encryption. And you still only get ten tries. . .
That was what was reported.
They weren't about to tell us the NSA had vacuumed up every bit and byte of voice and data that iPhone ever got or sent.
A $1,000,000.00 payment to an Israeli company to claim they "decrypted" the phone is dirt cheap to keep the BIG SECRET that NSA has all of your and my elevtronic communications on record.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯¯
'Justice Department officials said that they needed access to Mr. Alshamrani’s phones to see data and messages from encrypted apps like Signal or WhatsApp to determine whether he had discussed his plans with others at the base and whether he was acting alone or with help.'
“6 [major] versions back” is iPhone 5.
They NSA is fully capable of disassembling the chip on the phone and reading it directly with an electron microscope.
I spent 35 years in Silicon Valley working with programmers. I don't buy this. There may not be a known backdoor, but there is one.
That is the software option. There is also a hardware option. Who makes the chips in the phone? It is not hard to add a "vulnerability" into the hardware.
Not saying that Apple should or should not help, but there is a way to do it.
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