U.S. Says It May Not Need Apple’s Help to Unlock iPhone

In this context, yes.

Newegg's actions were different, in that the patent owner's dropping the suit didn't actually resolve the question of infringement. It was still out there, and the patent owner could re-file suit at any point in the future. Between now and then, if Newegg were in fact infringing, monetary damages would continue to pile up. So the uncertainty can have a pretty significant impact on business decisions and impair their ability to operate. A request for declaratory judgment seeks to resolve that uncertainty so that both parties can get back to normal.

For Newegg, the request accomplishes a few things. It lets them clear the air, indirectly help solve the resulting from the remaining suits against retailers selling Rosewill products, and it's the legal equivalent of spiking the football and giving the troll a swift kick in the nuts. Minero Digital now gets to defend itself in a Delaware court, absent all of the little advantages of East Texas. It's a rather bad break for them.

Honestly, if I were a patent troll, I'd be scared shitless to send a letter to someone like Newegg. With their stance on patent suits, they're exactly the sort of company that would preemptively file a request for declaratory judgment after they were contacted.

This was probably the best possible case for them to try this with. They had a terrorist attack on American soil, and one involving Islamic extremists at that. Not only is there less than zero sympathy for the attackers, there's also an element of fear that you have here as well to go along with the hatred people tend to feel towards terrorists and mass shooters.

They probably thought that if it came down to a PR battle, assuming Apple didn't just roll over for fear of the PR consequences of "obstructing a terror investigation," they had it in the bag. Turns out? Not so much.

While the legal maneuvering is interesting, I'd like to talk more about the technical mechanisms. Is it actually possible?

Snowden said the FBI is full of shit[1] and of course the phone is hackable, citing an ACLU report.[2] This report states that one could "easily" bypass the auto-erase-after-10-attempts function by popping out the Flash memory chip, copying its contents into some sort of test rig wired in its place, and then restoring it whenever it gets erased.

This is an interesting modification of an attack scenario laid out in an excellent review of iPhone/iOS8 security by Matthew Green:

"Since only the device itself knows UID -- and the UID can't be removed from the Secure Enclave -- this means all password cracking attempts have to run on the device itself. That rules out the use of FPGA or ASICs to crack passwords. Of course Apple could write a custom firmware that attempts to crack the keys on the device but even in the best case such cracking could be pretty time consuming, thanks to the 80ms PBKDF2 timing."[3]

What this theoretical rig changes is it essentially allows a custom chip to run on the device (namely a delete-proof Flash chip), bypassing the need for Apple to write custom firmware. So a typical 6 digit one would take under a day to crack, based on the 80ms cost per attempt.

So, it does seem possible to crack the pre-A7 phone in question with this rig.

However, and here is where it gets interesting, Apple has said conflicting things about current phones. One the one hand, ever since the A7 they've added a hardware-level escalating time delay between failed passcode attempts:

"On devices with an A7 or later A-series processor, the delays are enforced by the Secure Enclave. If the device is restarted during a timed delay, the delay is still enforced, with the timer starting over for the current period."[4]

This would in theory make it infeasible to attempt this kind of rig on a current iPhone. Even a typical weak passcode would encounter an hour-long delay at least once every 10 attempts. It could take years to bruteforce all but the most predictable passcodes.

However, Apple has also said that "Yes, it is certainly possible to create an entirely new operating system to undermine our security features as the government wants."[5] This would seem to suggest that software alone could enable bruteforcing, and this implication is in stark contrast to the statement on hardware defenses within the secure enclave. (Did they mean possible only on pre-A7 phones? It sure feels like they feel there's more at stake than that.)

So I don't know what to believe at this point. The ACLU seems wrong in suggesting that this particular rig would work on anything but old pre-A7 iPhones, based on the current secure enclave's time delay. But Apple has outright stated that GovtOS could enable the cracking of iPhones. So... how?

[1] https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/707299113449230336

[2] https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-future/one-fbis-major-claims-...

[3] http://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2014/10/why-cant-app...

[4] https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

[5] http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/answers/

Which in turn could mean that the standard request is valid, or appears to be valid to the respective party.

Are you suggesting they go out of business like Lavabit? That is the stand you're taking when you disobey orders to keep government requests secret. And, I'm not sure a large corporation has that option. How could shareholders accept a fine for which they're not permitted to know the details?

Remember when Snowden first revealed the Prism program? All the tech companies issued similar statements saying they want to tell people more, but did not have permission from the US government. For example, Apple said,

> Like several other companies, we have asked the U.S. government for permission to report how many requests we receive related to national security and how we handle them. We have been authorized to share some of that data, and we are providing it here in the interest of transparency. [1]

Also, I'm sure Yahoo would've loved to rally support from its users when the government was threatening to fine them $250,000 per day for refusing to hand over data, but they were not allowed to tell anyone [2]

I do believe the government was doing what they thought was right to protect public safety. However, they don't understand technology. Ted Lieu is about the only guy in Congress who does. We need a bit more representation there to have our voices heard, whether through electing Congressmen with CS backgrounds, independent lobbying like the EFF, or just better tech reporting and questioning in the White House daily briefs.

The existence of the FISA courts is something we should be scrutinizing more. Former NSA Director Hayden pointed out in one interview that we're the only country who has such secret courts. With these courts, democracy is circumvented. Currently, the public is not able to participate in the discussion of what's right on some major issues that have far reaching impact.

[1] http://www.apple.com/apples-commitment-to-customer-privacy/

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/11/yahoo-nsa-lawsu...