FBI Should Try To Unlock iPhone Without Apple's Help, Lawmaker Says (csoonline.com) 254
itwbennett writes: Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and former car-alarm entrepreneur, has suggested that the FBI try unlocking mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook by copying the hard drive and running password attempts until they find the correct password. Bruce Sewell, Apple's senior vice president and general counsel, said during a congressional hearing that, although the company doesn't know the condition of the shooter's iPhone, Issa's approach may work.
Seems like... (Score:4, Insightful)
This guy over here.... (Score:3, Insightful)
This guy's so far behind the times, he thinks an Iphone has a hard drive in it.
Re:This guy over here.... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Are they actually serious? I assumed this was the way that it was always done; for as long as I can remember it's always been pointed out that self-destruct traps are essentially pointless as no serious attacker would be so grossly incompetent that they'd try to break into the original.
For things like rubber hose protection you'd use plausible deniability material instead where the 'wrong' password reveals something somewhat embarrassing but fairly innocent, so they basically can't tell if there's anything
Re:This guy over here.... (Score:5, Informative)
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There's no way to get the key out of the physical secure enclave and into the VM's secure enclave. If there was, you wouldn't need the VM, since you'd have the key.
Re:This guy over here.... (Score:4, Insightful)
The difference is that on iPhones, Apple has managed to design the system in such a way that breaking into the original is the only practical choice. I mean, they can make a copy, but that means they have to copy the code hard-wired into the encryption chip, not just the data in the flash. To copy that chip, they have to very carefully physically disassemble it with acid and lasers, and then examine the circuits with an electron microscope.
And if they care that damn much then that's exactly what they should do, not force Apple to create a tool to allow the FBI subvert everybody else's security at-will.
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"not force Apple to create a tool to allow the FBI subvert everybody else's security at-will."
If I understand correctly they want Apple to use their signing key to 'update' the phone's software with a version that doesn't delete the encryption key after 20 attempts.
How does that make other iphones less secure?
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Now the feds have a signed image they can load onto any iPhone and crack it without even talking to a judge.
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Not quite. The FBI probably wouldn't be allowed to retain a copy of this signed image, which would stay with Apple. (I'm sure that the NSA and the Chinese Ministry of State Security would manage to obtain a copy, though...)
The problem is that once it exists, courts would start compelling its use. Remember, this is the 13th time that law enforcement agencies have tried to compel Apple to break into a phone.
Anti-terrorism tools have this way of being used against-non-terrorists. How long before someone tries
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The idea is telling a government "no" so no precedent is set. This is important as recent history shows that the FBI, NSA, TSA, etc. don't give a flying fuck about legality when it comes to their actions, and you know once they have that precedent set they will proceed with blanket surveillance, "for security." They've been regarding 1984 as an instruction manual rather than a warning.... and The People have been likewise regarding "Idiocracy" as an instruction manual rather than a warning.
Re:This guy over here.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, the trick (as I understand it) is that the phone uses the CPU's internal UID as part of the AES-256 key, ensuring that all cracking attempts must be done on that phone. There's no way to read the UID out of the CPU without extreme measures.
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then yes, he would be a fucking moron.
FTFY.
Re:This guy over here.... (Score:5, Insightful)
He called it a hard-drive, not a hard-disk. Honestly, we're splitting hairs about shit literally no one that does not frequent technology blogs gives a crap about. This is especially true because the HDD/SSD distinction has no bearing on the merits of his suggestion.
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I disagree. It's a pretty concrete example that he has no idea what he's talking about. It's handy to know when someone has their incompetence bit set so we can skip the rest of their argument.
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Except the rest of his suggestion still holds, so in this case your stupid-bit-check yields too many false positives to be of any actual use.
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Someone with domain knowledge, please correct me:
My understanding is that the NAND/Flash is protected by strong encryption and is not easily hackable. The PIN unlocks the key for the NAND device, and if the PIN is incorrect 10 times, the key is deleted (not the NAND contents).
Approach may work (Score:2, Interesting)
Well duh the approach may work, which is one of the reasons the All Writs Act shouldn't apply (it is only supposed to be used when Apple's help is necessary, not 'necessary for how we feel like doing it'). But the goal of the FBI is not, and has never been, to actually get into the phone. The FBI's goal all along has been to use this as ammunition to press Congress for mandated backdoors and/or more funding for their 'cybercrime' division.
You can bet your ass the NSA already HAS a copy and is either activel
How Long Have You Got (Score:3)
“I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice, said during his keynote address at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C., last Monday. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”
From: The iPhone Has Passed a Key Security Threshold [technologyreview.com]
I'm sure a politician knows more about crypto than MIT or the DoJ.
Re:How Long Have You Got (Score:5, Funny)
It all depends on password strength. If it is based on a PIN number (4 digits), then it is of course very very easy to brute force decryption. If it is based on finger print, it is even easier: a finger print is 1 digit only! /ducks
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A good pun is its own reword.
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Whilst a bad pun is its own pun...ishment.
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I have a digital image to share with you.
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You lost me. Try explaining it with Alice trying to steal Bob's car.
Copyedit summary please??? (Score:2)
try unlocking mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook
Good luck unlocking a dead man.
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try unlocking mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook
Good luck unlocking a dead man.
You'd think they would have preserved his fingers...
Sadly, the phone is obviously very vulnerable (Score:2)
because the password the user typed can't be long enough to be secure from brute force.
The phone is only "secure" if you can depend on the OS to wipe the phone after 5 bad attempts.
If you can get into the phone's internal flash, it's game over.
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Oh, I thought it was more like a 7 number pin.
But still:
1) no one can remember short secure passwords, because the entropy is too high.
2) You need sentences and that requires more like 300 characters unless you're chinese. So secure is 18 randomly chosen words from a large dictionary with other words stuck in to turn them into sentences.
3) no one is going to type at a little phone screen for 15 minutes every time they want to use it!
They should do it, but they haven't. Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
The answer is easy. They are not interested in the contents of the terrorist's phone as much as they want a magic key that will unlock anyone's iPhone anywhere. The NSA already has all the metadata from this phone recorded anyway, so the whole alarmist search for the phone's contents is a front for the government's overweening desire to pry into everyone's life.
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The answer is easy. They are not interested in the contents of the terrorist's phone as much as they want a magic key that will unlock anyone's iPhone anywhere.
That is it exactly. This is a high profile case. A major terrorist attack on US soil. What better way to convince the public that there NEEDS to be a backdoor on their devices? They aren't going to let this opportunity go to waste.
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That is it exactly. This is a high profile case. A major terrorist attack on US soil.
I will probably go to hell for saying this, and I mean no disrepect to anyone affected by the San Bernadino shootings, but I quibble with "A major terrorist attack on US soil". This was two people with easily available weapons which can be had at thousands of locations throughout the US. If the "major terrorist attack" bar is set that low, we can never be safe from terrorism, since literally any two people in the country might be terrorists. The 9/11 attacks were definitely a major attack. McVeigh blowi
I'm disappointed with Slashdot - (Score:2, Interesting)
it's a forum full of geeks.
A forum full of geeks knows it's not that hard to break into an iPhone and this is nothing but a political maneuver.
I've stated before John McAffee is calling out the obviousness of the situation [thedailyliberator.com], but just like all the other political stuff that creeps across the site the modern Slashdot feels the need to prop up the political agenda despite the obvious answers staring us right in the face.
Simple test (Score:2)
Here is a simple test if you think McAffee is being legit here. Take another iPhone and encrypt it and give it to him and see if he can get the data off of it. Otherwise, talk is cheap, particularly if you know you never will have to make good on it.
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I'm sure he would do that, propose that to him and the FBI - use an "Escrow" phone of the same model with some target data on it placed and encrypted by a third party - not McAfee or any government agency. If he succeeds then let him at it.
I have difficulty beleiving... (Score:2, Interesting)
...that the NSA or some other US intelligence agency cannot/has not cracked this phone. What I find more believable is that they have the information and they want to force Apple to crack the phone to protect their methods and knowledge of their access. If they win the get the bonus of sticking it to Apple and get a precedent they can use in other cases.
this whole thing is fishy to me (Score:5, Insightful)
What I fundamentally don't understand is this:
EITHER
a) if this is GENUINELY a mattter of national security, the FBI could actually hand the phone to the NSA and get the information in about 30 seconds but for some reason isn't doing so, or
b) the NSA's upteen-gajillion-dollar "black" budget has pretty much enabled them to record/analyze/store only the utterly banal unencrypted conversations that you could hear just sitting and listening to the guy next to you at the coffeeshop, ie almost entirely wasted on stupid crap.
I don't see really any other alternative.
I'd expect, for example, that Russian and Chinese government communications are ROUTINELY of a higher level of encryption than the bloody iPhone you can buy at the mall, and yet the NSA's *job* is to listen in on that stuff and they claim that they're pretty damned good at it?
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That's because the real situation is:
c) The FBI wants Apple (and other phone manufacturers) to give them backdoor access. So far, phone manufacturers have resisted this. So the FBI is using this high profile case relating to terrorism (that "scary word" that all too often gives politicians root access to do anything they want) to set a precedent. If it goes according to the FBI's plan, then Apple will be forced to help them unlock this one phone. Then another phone will need to be unlocked and the prece
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And it should bite them in the ass. When apple makes future versions not take updates when in a locked state.
Be careful what you ask for.... (Score:2)
We should all be careful what we ask for. As it stands, right now, for the FBI to gain access to a phone in a criminal investigation, they need to get a court order to have Apple, or whomever unlock it. There is at least some check and balance to government intrusion, albeit small. If Apple succeeds in their appeal, then it is likely that the FBI will develop their own tools to access the data in the future, in which case, they will not need a court order any longer.
If Apple succeeds, this may be a case
"Car-Alarm Entrepreneur"? (Score:2)
Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and former car-alarm entrepreneur...
I'm assuming there's a lot more to him. Because reading sentences like that makes me think California gets too many congressional seats if they give them to people who seem to have so little background in law or government.
Problem solved (Score:2)
Find surveilance of the guy unlocking his phone in public. Problem solved!
Re:yes they should (Score:5, Informative)
Re:yes they should (Score:4, Interesting)
That isn't the problem, but the real problem is that the private key is kept in NAND memory, not the flash memory (what they're calling the "hard drive"). The FBI isn't already doing this because it's really hard... mathematically hard. As in, unless they have quantum computers we don't know about, they won't be able to figure out what's on that phone for eons. And without the private key, it would be hard to even know the difference between the encrypted gobbledygook and the unencrypted data if you crack it.
I maintain that they are pretty sure that there's nothing of value on that phone, and that this whole exercise was a ruse to gain government backdoors to encryption because, terrorism.
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From my understanding, even if they do have quantum computers, it may still take eons. Quantum computers don't solve things instantly, and while they're faster against AES, they reduce the bit strength by about half, leaving 256-bit AES the equivalent of about 128 bit, still likely strong enough to withstand any reasonable amount of brute forcing. Depending on the speed of the quantum computer, even if going up against AES-128, the 64-bit equivalent may still be unbreakable for years.
Re: yes they should (Score:2)
It is hard, but between the NSA and the FBI they should be working hard to develop new techniques. Maybe the military could even chip in, if it really is an issue of national defence, as is the case in the IS argument? Wasn't the NSA meant to be the brain that could crack anything?
One benefit of having techniques that only governments can afford and have access to, is that the methods would be hard for a 'script kiddie' to reproduce.
One thing is that the encryption is probably hard, but probably predictable
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You're missing that the mechanism which unlocks the actual encryption key based on the PIN is not software but a tamperproof chip.
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The iPhone 5c doesn't have the "tamperproof chip." That's only in the current generation.
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You could copy the Flash memory storage, but to actually decrypt that you need a copy of the key that's in chips on the motherboard. Those chips are not designed to tell the world what their key is without the right PIN, and without their key or a centuries+long decryption job the data is simply unreadable. And the chips erase themselves after 10 failed PINs.
So to make your 100-copies you'd have to destroy all the chips in question, because the only way to read it is acid, and acid does not leave chips in w
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Just because something is encrypted, doesn't mean you can't copy it. What's your source on this unreadable uncopyable "NAND" memory? Even if the filesystem key is stored encrypted by the UID and pin, if you can make a single copy of that encrypted block (and then repeatedly copy from that) - the complexity becomes a matter of brute forcing the pin (not the stronger UID or filesystem key). So, what's the story on this?
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That's what I've been wondering - what's stopping them from pulling the hard drive (or whatever) and copying it? I think the FBI is just being lazy. Then there's the question of what they think they even need from the phone. After all, it's a network device, and most of what it does happens across the network. They have all that data already - phones calls, web activity, GPS, etc. Greedy and lazy.
Re:yes they should (Score:5, Informative)
No, not on the iPhone 5C it isn't.
The 'Secure Enclave' is 5S, 6, 6+, 6S, and 6S+.
Re:yes they should (Score:5, Informative)
This is incorrect. The phone does not store the key anywhere. The key is made up of the phones unique identifier value, and your pin, combined to make the key. What they can do is use acid, high powered visual equipment and lasers to try to determine the unique identifier from the iPhones CPU, and then try to brute force that with various pin numbers.
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The attack makes sense. The filesystem key is not related to the UID, and the filesystem key is what is erased to prevent brute-forcing, not the encrypted file system on the SSD itself. If you get a copy of the eh, erasable memory (which may or may not be stored on the SSD), then you have the filesystem key. Be it that Apple is very mum about what actually talks to the devices, I don't know where that part of the memory is. Be it that the 5C doesn't even have a security enclave, I don't understand why you w
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The attack makes sense. The filesystem key is not related to the UID, and the filesystem key is what is erased to prevent brute-forcing, not the encrypted file system on the SSD itself. If you get a copy of the eh, erasable memory (which may or may not be stored on the SSD), then you have the filesystem key. Be it that Apple is very mum about what actually talks to the devices, I don't know where that part of the memory is. Be it that the 5C doesn't even have a security enclave, I don't understand why you wouldn't be able to just find the key and plug in the algorithm. With the security enclave, the phones would be vulnerable to the same attack, but they'd be rate limited by the security enclave meaning a small alphanumeric code could make it impossibly long to get into - but the self destruct system is bypassable.
But of course, if any of this is actually possible Apple's been lying about the security on their smartphones for literally years, and it's likely that almost every country could hack the system.
The whole design is that the drive can only be read with a key. Without the key it's encrypted gibberish. The key is derived from a) a chip on the motherboard, and b) your PIN. The chip is specifically designed so that it ain't gonna tell you it's bit unless the PIN is right. You could probably get the hardware bit
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The key is derived from a) a chip on the motherboard, and b) your PIN. The chip is specifically designed so that it ain't gonna tell you it's bit unless the PIN is right. You could probably get the hardware bit of the key by destroying the relevant chip to read it, but if you fuck that up the key is gone forever, and you still don't have a PIN. And the whole shebang kills itself (including the hardware bit of the key that you actually need if you wever want to read the iPhone's data) if you enter the wrong PIN 10 times.
The "Chip" you're talking about is the security enclave which is not on the iPhone 5C. The filesystem key is not stored in the security enclave. If you make a copy of the encrypted memory that stores the filesystem key bit for bit, then you've defeated the erasing system. It's also possible the FBI is terribly incompetent given they have multi million dollar forensic labs that can't figure out how to copy this memory.
The 5c has a hardware-defined security code that works roughly how I described. Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] has a fairly good article on how hard it would be to get the relevant info out of the iPhone without the PIN. Secure Enclave's new wrinkle is that most of the process got moved out of the OS into the firmware, not that the architecture of the security system changed.
I am far from an actual CompSci or EE person, so it's probable I'm missing more then a few little wrinkles in this system that are very important to the
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My guess would be... you don't get a second chance.. if you fuckup.. it's dead. And acid is not exactly the most predictable thing to work with.
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So you make another copy and try again?
You can't make a copy. That's the whole design of the system.
You can work around that by trying to apply just enough acid to just the right places to get the data off the chip that you would need to copy, but if you fuck it up the chip is ruined and the data is lost forever.
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How many years have we been reading about security researchers mounting clever side channel attacks on things like smart cards? Has everyone here forgotten about Tempest [wikipedia.org] already? So how likely is it that the NSA can't read a phone's hardware UID without acid-etching the CPU, either directly or by recovering the contents of memory? It could be simple as entering a PIN and observing what (wrong) encryption key the CPU generates.
But there are some really good reasons (from the FBI's standpoint) for compelli
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How many years have we been reading about security researchers mounting clever side channel attacks on things like smart cards? Has everyone here forgotten about Tempest [wikipedia.org] already?
Are you telling me that security researches get through clever side channel attacks first go without breaking hardware? That's the ticket here. Whatever they are going to do needs to be damn certain that it's going to work.
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How about just booting existing OS and reading/writing the RAM if you have hardware access?
It is assumed that Apple already has backdoor to disable unlock attempt counter, so it should be possible for everybody if you can skip Apple signature requirement for new code.
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I think I might have thought of a way in (or at least a different way to try) but I'm unsure of the technical details. At some point, there's the chip that sends a message to erase the data or to encrypt it with garbage. That has to travel over some sort of bus. Get a model of the same phone, observe the signal that is sent when that is intentionally done on the second phone, and the interrupt it. This does nothing for the time delay but I'd give even odds that such is overlooked and a simple reboot will st
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This plus write-blocking, welcome to modern disk forensics.
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That's the whole point of the hard drive copy. Who cares if it deletes a copy. Make another try again.
Apparently, there are multiple parts to the key.
1. the pin number (probably just 4 digits)
2. the unique identifier burned into the silicon (impossible to recover without taking apart the chip with acid and stuff and looking at it with microscopes, and you may not get it right if you do that)
3. a long random number stored in NAND
All of that is combined and then used as a symmetric AES key to encrypt the data on the flash.
The "phone wipes the drive" is not accurate. When the phone wipes the drive, it actually
Re:yes they should (Score:5, Funny)
and watch the phone format itself after they fail.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the answer from a 6 digit Slashdot member. It manages an almost perfect balance between trollish and imbecilic, while leaving no doubt about the fact he didn't RTFA.
At 5 digits, his reply would be a dupe of a previous one, and you'd understand he doesn't even understand the concept of the article.
At 4, the comment would just be an anagram of both "first post" and a bodily fluid.
Reading a 3 digits comment would be akin to hearing the voice of God.
At 2 digits, the words shape the chaos into reality.
Not even Gods speak about single digit comments. And when they do it's in weakly whispers. For such power is better to leave asleep.
Re:yes they should (Score:4, Funny)
7-digit ID talking shit about 6-digit IDs. Now I've seen it all.
Re:yes they should (Score:5, Informative)
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I missed that golden threshold, alas, but can I still have demigod status?
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Re:yes they should (Score:4, Informative)
I could have had a 4-digit id, but I come from an era when long-term lurking before posting was considered virtuous.
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Low UIDs aren't that uncommon. There are 899 three digit UIDs.
That represents about 0.02% of the Slashdot user base, give or take, and they aren't all active.
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Frost spit since I'm from Minnesota you insensitive clod.
Re:yes they should (Score:5, Funny)
Let there be...
nevermind.
Re: yes they should (Score:4, Insightful)
The FBI should copy the contents of the storage medium to another storage medium and attempt to brute-force it. That's what the lawmaker is saying in a nutshell. This lawmaker is actually making our case, that it's not Apple or any other vendor's job to break their own security, that it's the investigating agency's job to essentially prove its case by doing that work itself. Stop attacking the person actually trying to help by nitpicking what they say.
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Now you're just being pedantic.
On that note, my laptop has something which the vendor referred to its flash storage as "solid state disk". This term more accurately describes a rotating hard drive, which is both made from matter in its solid state and disk-shaped.
Language is a social contract in which Alice agrees to try to make herself understood and Bob tries to understand. In this case, the lossy communication channel did the job.
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iPhones can get USB dongles to allow data to be copied to a memory card. Android smartphones have a socket for a removable SD card (any size from 8GB to 128GB). The memory is really that cheap (and small as a fingernail). Perfect for backing up data, even if the USB cable port won't accept data service.
Re:It's not about the phone... or the crime (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, the suggestion is (perhaps accidentally) correct in that it is the FBI's job to discover evidence in their own possession, not Apple's. The burden of cracking the phone should be on the agency.
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In this case, the suggestion is (perhaps accidentally) correct in that it is the FBI's job to discover evidence in their own possession, not Apple's. The burden of cracking the phone should be on the agency.
Isn't that what they are trying to do (not that I'm saying they are in the right, here). They are trying to get to the data on the phone. They aren't asking Apple to decrypt the evidence, just to keep the phone from erasing the evidence.
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The court seems to be in a position of weighing up which of two things
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What makes you think they would want to boot it? Reading it is supposed to be what they want to do.
It seems a strange thing to say but John McCafee's comment about the cost of the NSA's backdoor seems to have introduced some sanity into the discussion, who would have thunk it?
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Does it make it's own clock internally and have a capacitor on Vcc.
Otherwise it's susceptible to voltage and clock glitching. Just like the last generation of sat receiver smart cards.
All you have to do is 16x it's processor clock for the cycle where it's trying to store the 'PIN try count exceeded' flag, or do the same when incrementing the fail count.
Or just burn up one low bit of memory at the address the fail count is stored at.
But all these approaches would ultimately be '1 try'. After you've
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So figure out the passcode (shouldn't be that hard, since people typically use simple PINs or ones that are meaningful to them) to get the decryption key?
How many times have we been told, "all bets are off once you've got physical control of the h/w"? Well, they've got physical control of the h/w.
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You do know that you actually can make laws, right? It's a citizen government, where you can run for office, or even go through the process of getting a ballot measure passed.
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So, pretty much about as easy as decrypting an iPhone without the key.
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You do know that you actually can make laws, right? It's a citizen government, where you can run for office, or even go through the process of getting a ballot measure passed.
If you have a couple of million/billion dollars to spare and/or enough of the right friends. Preferably in one or the other major political parties.
Otherwise, good luck - you'll need it!
Here is how it works. You run for something local, like city council or school board. You show up at party functions to become a member of a party, and gain credibility within the party. You develop a name for yourself so that when you want to run for state office people have heard of you and you seem like a reasonable candidate.
Then you start thinking about running for a national office.
If you have millions of your own money or friends willing to fund you you can skip some of those steps, but if you go t
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They won't even consider letting you run for state office until the party has a _large_ pile of dirt on you.
Enough that you'd suicide before turning on them.
Think about what it takes to keep this kind of large conspiracy somewhat secret.
It's not by accident that we have no competent politicians. It's only partly explained by the fact that decent people don't want the job.
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Think about what it takes to keep this kind of large conspiracy somewhat secret.
Which is precisely why I don't believe that there is a conspiracy.
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Obviously none of our laws apply to law enforcement, so sure, go right ahead - and while you're at it tell the government that the constitution is meaningless - they can trample any right they like at any time for anyone.
Just the opposite. If the laws didn't apply to law enforcement, then there wouldn't be a court case about this incident. It would already have been unlocked.