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Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

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Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#81

Post by jbapple »

tptacek wrote: post #72
jbapple wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They may have collaborated with people who were never apprehended on the attack that actually happened. Right, but we don't go searching everyone's papers just in case they are conspirators. If Alice punches Bob in the face, then is hit by a bus and dies, we don't go searching through all of Alice's stuff just in case there might have been someone else involved with the Bob-punching incident, right? Is there any ev…

Well, it is.

> Well, it is.

I didn't say it isn't; I said it shouldn't be.

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#82

Post by gst »

azernik wrote: post #48
gst wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do this on purpose after asked to unlock your phone you will probably be charged with destruction of evidence or something like that. However, while a court is (afaik) able to ask you to put your finger on the fingerprint reader, you do not need to tell them which of the fingers the correct one is. So instead of purposely using a wrong finger, I'd ask the court to explicitly tell me which of my fingers I shoul…

I think the court would similarly consider that obstruction and contempt. If they tell you to unlock your phone and you try to play some "first you have to guess which finger's the right one!" game, the judge will slap you with either contempt of court or refusal to comply with a subpoena.

IANAL, but I don't think there's much of a difference between asking someone to reveal the correct password and asking someone to reveal the correct finger. In both cases you would be asked to incriminate yourself.

If it would be lawful for a court to ask you to "unlock the phone with the correct finger" then they might as well also ask you to "unlock this harddisk with the correct keyboard keys pushed in the correct order (as a password)".

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#83

Post by philip1209 »

tptacek wrote: post #42
Myrmornis wrote: post #36

Why the worry about auto-wiping? Is it not possible to make a copy of the encrypted data and then play around with it as much as you want?

The data the DOJ wants is encrypted with AES, so all the phone has to wipe is the key; a copy of the encrypted data is useless.

This seems like a key thing to convey to the courts. One piece of encrypted data is supplied, rather than another. Who has to explain to the courts the complexity of breaking one versus the other?

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#84

Post by bdamm »

Zigurd wrote: post #53
gst wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you do this on purpose after asked to unlock your phone you will probably be charged with destruction of evidence or something like that. However, while a court is (afaik) able to ask you to put your finger on the fingerprint reader, you do not need to tell them which of the fingers the correct one is. So instead of purposely using a wrong finger, I'd ask the court to explicitly tell me which of my fingers I shoul…

Use your middle finger to actually unlock and use your index finger to fail. Unless the phone retains the biometric data after erasing itself, it's deniable.

This might work in the short term, but if enough folks actually did it, there would soon be a law that you may only use your thumb to unlock your phone.

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#86

Post by manicdee »

X-Istence wrote: post #59
kevinastone wrote: post #16

Why wouldn't the FBI just clone the phone disk contents and crack the encryption on more dedicated systems?

Because AES is still secure unless the NSA knows something and is not sharing...

If I was the NSA, I certainly wouldn't be exposing the fact that I could crack AES for the sake of a trivial (to the NSA) crime like this.

What I would do, however, is engineer a situation where the FBI could believably brute force the password, then let them have at it for a few days until I supply them with the actual password. Then the FBI tells the public that the passphrase on the phone was actually something trivially guessable lime 000000.

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#87

Post by [deleted] »

greiskul wrote: post #79
X-Istence wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if there were no such safeguard, you'd still have to break AES encryption...

They "just" need to break the users password. If it's a weak one, which is likely for most users, a simple dictionary attack would work.

[deleted]

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#88

Post by BWStearns »

jbapple wrote: post #35
tptacek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. In fact, if it's possible for Apple to accomplish what DOJ is demanding of it, the best outcome would be for DOJ to succeed, and do so publicly: * There is an authentic need to get at the data on that phone * There's no likelihood at all that other users will be impacted by the backdoor * We'll all be on the same page about how secure these phones are versus the USG. It's possible that they can prevail a…

> There is an authentic need to get at the data on that phone What is the authentic need? The shooters are dead. Do we have reason to believe that there is evidence of any pending crimes or any old unsolved crimes on the phone?

If you shoot a bunch of people while declaring allegiance to an organized group known for shooting bunches of people then I think that pretty clearly demonstrates that reading your communications has a pretty high likelihood of turning up something useful in preventing future incidents. If this doesn't clear your hurdle for reasonable search then what would?

To be clear, I don't think the order to Apple is necessarily altogether a good idea or is even going to produce the desired results, but your complaint seems to be with the fact that this data is being pursued at all.

Edit to reply:

> Evidence of a conspiracy would help. You said they declared allegiance to an organized group. When they did that, did they say or hint that they had been in contact with that group, other than, say, watching public YouTube videos?

The woman in the couple declared it right before the shooting[0]. Do you want a notarized letter from the deceased?

> Would you agree that "high likelihood" is too low a bar for justifying searching the phones of people who live in high-crime neighborhoods?

I'm pretty sure neither "high likelihood" nor "authentic need" were being used as a term of art here, but I would bet that any judge would view the commission of murder declaredly for an organized militant group to be probable cause that there is information pertaining to more criminal activity by that group on these two's phones and in their communications.

Do you really view this as a government overreach or are you just trolling? Under what circumstances, if any, would you see as justified a search of someone's email? phone? house? So far you've equivocated between living in a bad neighborhood and committing murder-suicide.

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/05/us/tashfeen-malik-islamic-...

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#89

Post by X-Istence »

greiskul wrote: post #79
X-Istence wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if there were no such safeguard, you'd still have to break AES encryption...

They "just" need to break the users password. If it's a weak one, which is likely for most users, a simple dictionary attack would work.

The users password goes through a password based key derivation function, that function spits out an key that is use for the AES crypto used for the file system.

Now, the PBKDF requires a secret that is only stored within the iPhone itself (within the CPU even, where it can't be read out directly). So if we instead grab a copy of the data, all we get is an AES encrypted file system.

We have 2 choices. 1. We can attack AES directly, and attempt to brute force the AES key, or 2. We can attempt to get the AES key somehow by bruteforcing the users password.

2 is infinitely simpler compared to 1. However, 2 becomes more difficult (but still less so than just cracking AES itself) when you need to run your brute force guesses through the CPU within the iPhone.

Re: Apple ordered to bypass auto-erase on San Bernadino shooter's iPhone

#90

Post by eridius »

tptacek wrote: post #4

Remember, this is an iPhone 5C, which doesn't have Touch ID or the Secure Enclave; the security model for this phone is significantly different from that of more recent iPhones. On phones with a Secure Enclave, the wipe-on-failures state is managed in the coprocessor (which runs L4), and is not straightforwardly backdoor-able. If you're worried about the police brute-forcing your phone, enable Touch ID and set a pass…

Even without the Secure Enclave, is it even possible for Apple to do this? The article talks about how Apple could add a backdoor to the OS and update the software on the device in order to break this, but I'm not sure how anyone is supposed to update the software on the device while it's locked, without erasing the device in the process (assuming of course that the iPhone is running a relatively recent version of the OS to begin with). AIUI Apple used to have the ability to backdoor phones for use in complying with law enforcement requests, but they removed that ability several years ago. And of course if they still had that capability with this phone nobody would need to order them to add a backdoor anyway since they could just bypass the passcode directly.
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