681–690 of 1001 posts
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"To be fair - the only reason he's doing it is because it would cause a significant drop in sales for Apple devices." That's not being fair at all. To say the only reason he is doing it is to protect iPhone sales doesn't speak to Tim's character. Of course he cares about sales, but he also cares about privacy.
It's definitely one of those rare times doing the right thing is also the most profitable thing.
A) Apple has created unbreakable security. The FBI cannot access the data and needs Apple's help.
B) iPhone security, like all other security, is breakable. iPhones are a very high-value target (all data on all iPhones); therefore some national security organizations, probably many of them in many countries, have developed exploits. The FBI, following normal practice, does not want to reveal the exploits or capability and therefore must go through this charade.
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"To be fair - the only reason he's doing it is because it would cause a significant drop in sales for Apple devices." That's not being fair at all. To say the only reason he is doing it is to protect iPhone sales doesn't speak to Tim's character. Of course he cares about sales, but he also cares about privacy.
Why would it cause a significant drop? Where would those people go?
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I'm not sure you can draw the conclusion that Apple can push OS updates to a locked phone. What Tim Cook wrote is that > "install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation." > "the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession." So the FBI has the physical phone already. They can deliver to Apple who can disassemble it and either use a JTAG/Flash programmer on an internal connector to manua…
The 5C at issue in this case does not have the modern secure enclave like the 5S and newer devices. The newer devices run a special L4 kernel on the secure enclave. It is not updateable without providing the existing passcode. It enforces the attempt rate limiting and key deletion on too many attempts (if enabled). Special limited communication channels allow the CPU to talk to the SE. In production devices the SE ha…
The whole point is that it doesn't matter what the court thinks if Apple cannot comply due to the laws of nature. That was their whole argument to begin with. Their argument now is pretty mushy in comparison.
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"From what I understand Tim is doing, and I greatly admire, is trying to avoid a judicial requirement that they be able to do this on demand. The so called "back door" requirement, because he knows, as others do, that such a feature would be used by more than the intended audience, and for more than the intended uses, to the detriment of Apple's users." To be fair - the only reason he's doing it is because it would c…
"To be fair - the only reason he's doing it is because it would cause a significant drop in sales for Apple devices." That's not being fair at all. To say the only reason he is doing it is to protect iPhone sales doesn't speak to Tim's character. Of course he cares about sales, but he also cares about privacy.
Huge props to Apple - here's hoping against hope that Google, Facebook, and Amazon get behind this. One thing I was wondering is how Apple is even able to create a backdoor. It is explained toward the end: "The government would have us remove security features and add new capabilities to the operating system, allowing a passcode to be input electronically. This would make it easier to unlock an iPhone by “brute force…
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It's definitely one of those rare times doing the right thing is also the most profitable thing.
Doing the right thing is very often (if not almost always) the most profitable thing. It's very difficult to make a business out of serving your customers poorly; if you disagree, give it a shot, and let me know how it turns out for you.
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They don't even have to do that. They wrote the OS, they have the signing key for OS updates. All they need to do is push an update to the device with a backdoor that allows reading off the unencrypted contents post-boot (possibly with the addition of a judicially compelled fingerprint scan or PIN brute force to get the encryption key out of whatever on-device escrow it's stored in). The only way to secure the device…
How can they simply "push an update"? I've never seen iOS auto-update without first prompting the user, which I'm assuming is a very intentional limitation.
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It will become obvious, I think, in the following days. If they challenge the court order and fight vigorously to have it lifted, I am willing to believe that it is about the privacy. If they give in and say, "but we really didn't want to, they made us do it", I will consider their resistance more of a PR stunt. That story, by the way, is really nice. ;-)
I'd place a hefty wager on Apple fighting this until there is no legal recourse.
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Is that really true? The enclave's firmware is in ROM and non-upgradeable? I'd always assumed it got a signed blob like everything else does. Obviously it's possible to design a system like that, I just haven't seen it reported anywhere that it actually works like that. Edit just to be clear: the requirement really is that the firmware be stored in a ROM somewhere, probably on the SoC. That's a lot of die space (code…
I'm not claiming it is in ROM or that it is not upgradeable if you are Apple and have physical access to the device. I'm not sure on that point. What I think must be the case is that Apple can't remotely upgrade the SE firmware as part of its iOS update mechanism. Although, to be perfectly honest, I have not seen this explicitly documented.
(FWIW: OTA firmware updates are routine in the industry. I've worked on such systems professionally, though not for Apple.)