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Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

nytimes.com

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Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#11

Post by theGimp »

flavor8 wrote: post #8

> Breaking the code, according to an Apple technical guide, could take “more than 5 1/2 years to try all combinations of a six-character alphanumeric passcode with lowercase letters and numbers.” (Computer security experts question that figure, because Apple does not fully realize how quickly the N.S.A. supercomputers can crack codes.) Uh, what? Surely the journalist has missed an important technical detail here, rig…

There could be truth in that number depending on what encryption algorithms are used. Some take significantly longer than others to apply.

On a tangent, I trust Apple's competence but I have seen no information on the technicalities of this feature. I would like to hear specifics so we can estimate how secure the design is based on facts.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#13

Post by higherpurpose »

ionwake wrote: post #10
PeterBarrett wrote: post #7

A 6 letter alphanumeric password, do they think people use old laptops to generate the possible passwords?! It should be at least 128 or 256 if they're being serious about security and preferably much much longer than that.

Is it possible to brute force this? Using quantum computers?

I don't think you need quantum computers to bruteforce a 6-letter password.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#14

Post by ghshephard »

theGimp wrote: post #11
flavor8 wrote: post #8

> Breaking the code, according to an Apple technical guide, could take “more than 5 1/2 years to try all combinations of a six-character alphanumeric passcode with lowercase letters and numbers.” (Computer security experts question that figure, because Apple does not fully realize how quickly the N.S.A. supercomputers can crack codes.) Uh, what? Surely the journalist has missed an important technical detail here, rig…

There could be truth in that number depending on what encryption algorithms are used. Some take significantly longer than others to apply. On a tangent, I trust Apple's competence but I have seen no information on the technicalities of this feature. I would like to hear specifics so we can estimate how secure the design is based on facts.

Re: "I have seen no information on the technicalities of this feature."

https://www.apple.com/privacy/docs/iOS_Security_Guide_Sept_2...

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#15

Post by ghshephard »

PeterBarrett wrote: post #7

A 6 letter alphanumeric password, do they think people use old laptops to generate the possible passwords?! It should be at least 128 or 256 if they're being serious about security and preferably much much longer than that.

Depends on whether the decoding can be done offline, or requires the actual iPhone that the data is encrypted on.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#18

Post by sopooneo »

flavor8 wrote: post #8

> Breaking the code, according to an Apple technical guide, could take “more than 5 1/2 years to try all combinations of a six-character alphanumeric passcode with lowercase letters and numbers.” (Computer security experts question that figure, because Apple does not fully realize how quickly the N.S.A. supercomputers can crack codes.) Uh, what? Surely the journalist has missed an important technical detail here, rig…

I had the same thought. If we allow upper, lower, and digits, that's 26+26+10 = 62 possible characters per space. With six spaces, that gives 62^6 = 56,800,235,584 possible passwords.

Now if we take their figure of 5.5 years to crack a phone's files and divide, we get 327 seconds (more than 5 minutes) per password they check.

Something is off, though perhaps it's my math so please do double check it for me.

Edit: Argggg. Good corrections. My main problem is that I did my final division in the wrong direction. Fix that by taking a reciprocal: 1/327 = 0.003 seconds. And then correct that by a factor of 2 to assume they get each password in half possible time: 0.003 * 2 = 0.006 or roughly 6 milliseconds. Thanks for the quick check folks.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#19

Post by silentOpen »

FTA:

  At a news conference on Thursday devoted largely to
  combating terror threats from the Islamic State,
  Mr. Comey said, “What concerns me about this is companies
  marketing something expressly to allow people to hold
  themselves beyond the law.”
The state and the law are separate entities, Mr. Comey. It concerns me that, in your mind, you have conflated the power of the state with the normativity of the law.

In the twentieth century, the modern state gained the power to destroy all life on Earth. In the twenty-first century, the modern state and the modern citizen gained the power of private machine-assisted telepathy, memory, and computation. The state and its avatars must recognize that it cannot and must not have the ability to exercise absolute power over citizen's thoughts, computations, and communications if it wishes to foster a healthy and free society.

Re: Signaling Post-Snowden Era, New iPhone Locks Out N.S.A

#20

Post by Ntrails »

praptak wrote: post #4

Well dudes, you screwed it up for yourselves with illegal wiretapping, the perhaps legal but still outrageous secret court orders and the attitude you presented when all this came to light. Fuck you.

"I'd hate to have people look at me and say, 'Well how come you can't save this kid?' 'How come you can't do this thing?'" said Mr Comey in a briefing. [1]

A separate article on the same sort of thing. But, I can't help but laugh at how the instant canned response from the FBI was "WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN".

It's pathetic, even more so because it keeps working.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29378172

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