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Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

nytimes.com

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Re: Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

#61

Post by megablast »

buro9 wrote: post #22
robhu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely it is a company's best interests to have 'good enough' looking security to serve their PR purposes while also secretly providing government access to maximise government kudos and all the benefits that would entail?

Not really. For many customers of hardware and software trust is what is being sold. As trust is eroded 'good enough' is no longer good enough. The only way to continue to be trusted is to be more secure, and as the grandparent points out the endgame there is that the encryption puts the software and hardware beyond the reach of the company that produced it.

While the majority could not care less, and would be more than happy to sell out their own privacy for a "safer" world.

Re: Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

#62

Post by guscost »

FussyZeus wrote: post #41
toomuchtodo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All bets are off if the iPhone is power-cycled. Best bet if you're pulled over by authorities or at a security checkpoint is to turn off your iPhone (and have a strong alphanumeric passcode). Excellent advice. Even better, if you're about to pass through US customs and border patrol, backup the phone first, wipe, and restore on the other side. Of course, this depends on your level of paranoia. I am paranoid.

Wiping the phone doesn't help you. Using the strong password renders the information inaccessible, at least as inaccessible as your phone backup is. Touch ID isn't re-enabled until the phone's passcode is used. Presumably if the authorities have access to your phone's memory they also have access to your laptops, and neither will do them any damn good. And it's paranoia if there's a legitimate threat, that's just cal…

> Touch ID isn't re-enabled until the phone's passcode is used.

Do the docs confirm that there is no way around this? I'd guess generating the encryption key requires the passcode, which is discarded immediately, and Touch ID can only "unlock" a temporarily re-encrypted version which never leaves ephemeral storage?

Re: Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

#63

Post by IBM »

surye wrote: post #57
abalone wrote: post #50

It's important to emphasize something: iCloud will always be "backdoored", by design, and backing up to iCloud is what most users should and will be doing. The reason iCloud data will always be accessible by Apple, and thus governments, is not because Apple wants to make it accessible to governments. It's so that Apple can offer customers the very important feature of accessing their own data if they forget or otherw…

> When someone passes away, for example, it would be a terrible compounding tragedy if all their photos from their whole life passed away along with them, because they didn't tell anyone their password or where they kept the backup key. Would you really expect Apple to recover the data in this scenario for the next of kin? I certainly wouldn't, and I wouldn't want them to.

I think they do when they get a court order authorizing it from the estate.

Re: Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

#64

Post by cromwellian »

tptacek wrote: post #49
cromwellian wrote: post #36

Any device that relies on hiding secrets inside the silicon itself is subject to hacking. Several secure-enclave like chips have been hacked in the past by using electron microscopes and direct probes on the silicon. If BlackHat conference independent security researchers have the resources to pull this off, Apple and the NSA certainly can. Exfiltrating the Enclave UID could be done by various mechanisms at the chip…

A couple issues: * Decapping and feature extraction even from simpler devices is error prone; you can destroy the device in the process. You only get one bite at the apple; you can't "image" the hardware and restore it later. Since the government is always targeting one specific phone, this is a real problem. * There's no one byte you can write to bypass all the security on an iPhone, because (barring some unknown re…

No, the chief protection against the PIN code hacking comes from the retry counter. The FBI doesn't need the crypto keys, it just needs the PIN code. So it needs to brute force about 10,000 PIN codes.

Any mechanism that prevents the application processor from either a) remembering it incremented the count b) corrupts the count or c) patches the logic that handles a retry count of 10, is sufficient to attack the phone.

Somewhere in the application processor, code like this is running:

if (numTries >= MAX_RETRY_ATTEMPTS) { wipe(); }

or

if (numTries >= MAX_RETRY_ATTEMPTS) { retryTime = retryTime * 2; }

Now there are two possibilities. Either there are redundant checks, or there aren't. If there aren't redundant checks, all you need to do is corrupt this code path or memory in a way that prevents it's execution, even if it is to crash the phone and trigger a reboot. Even with 5 minutes between crash reboot cycles, they could try all 10,000 pins in 34 days.

But you could also use more sophisticated attacks if you know where in RAM this state is stored. You couldn't need to de-capp the chip, you could just use local methods to flip the bits. The iPhone doesn't use ECC RAM, so there are a number of techniques you could use.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-630.pdf

Re: Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

#66

Post by petra »

tptacek wrote: post #20
w1ntermute wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you use a strong alphanumeric password to unlock your phone, there is nothing Apple has been able to do for many years to unlock your phone Is this true even if you use Touch ID?

Probably not. If you're dead, they probably have your fingers. If you're alive, they can compel you to unlock the device with your fingerprint. The only point I'm making is that Apple already designed a cryptosystem that resists court-ordered coercion: as long as your passcode is strong (and Apple has allowed it to be strong for a long time), the phone is prohibitively difficult to unlock even if Apple cuts a special…

Using a strong pin is pretty annoying, and a relatively visible signal when using the phone on the street etc, So it can be a good filter(maybe via street cams) to filter suspicious people - which isn't a bad goal for law enforcement.

Re: Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

#67

Post by studentrob »

Good. Congress shall pass no law abridging freedom of speech, and code has been ruled free speech.

The only reason previous wiretapping laws were passed is because they weren't in the limelight and the public never had a chance to weigh in. Let's make this an election issue

Re: Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

#68

Post by jellicle »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #30
r00fus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have access to a live finger for the TouchID, sure they can bypass - but they could do that with the $5 guaranteed coercion method as well [1]. Copying a good fingerprint from a dead finger or a randomly placed print is not easy [2]. It's hard, doable but you get 5 tries so if you screw up, you have thrown away all the hard work of the print transfer. All bets are off if the iPhone is power-cycled. Best bet i…

> All bets are off if the iPhone is power-cycled. Best bet if you're pulled over by authorities or at a security checkpoint is to turn off your iPhone (and have a strong alphanumeric passcode). Excellent advice. Even better, if you're about to pass through US customs and border patrol, backup the phone first, wipe, and restore on the other side. Of course, this depends on your level of paranoia. I am paranoid.

If you're paranoid, making a complete copy of all your secrets on some remote Apple or Google "cloud" where the government can get at it trivially is the exact opposite of what you want to be doing.

Re: Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

#69

Post by trustfundbaby »

plorkyeran wrote: post #33
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody would adopt them. It's annoying enough to deal with 4 digits when it's cold and I'm wearing gloves and I just want to change the song I'm listening to. Passphrases suck enough whenever you have to log back in. Are people really gonna put up with that every time they want to use their phone? On the other hand, if there were a convenient way to toggle between passphrases and 4-digit unlock, (especially if you ha…

I'd love to have a long passphrase that has to be entered after booting and every 48 hours, and then a 4-digit pin that's usable when TouchID is for when I'm unlocking my phone with my nose.

clearly you're not the average user.

Re: Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

#70

Post by deegles »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #30
r00fus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they have access to a live finger for the TouchID, sure they can bypass - but they could do that with the $5 guaranteed coercion method as well [1]. Copying a good fingerprint from a dead finger or a randomly placed print is not easy [2]. It's hard, doable but you get 5 tries so if you screw up, you have thrown away all the hard work of the print transfer. All bets are off if the iPhone is power-cycled. Best bet i…

> All bets are off if the iPhone is power-cycled. Best bet if you're pulled over by authorities or at a security checkpoint is to turn off your iPhone (and have a strong alphanumeric passcode). Excellent advice. Even better, if you're about to pass through US customs and border patrol, backup the phone first, wipe, and restore on the other side. Of course, this depends on your level of paranoia. I am paranoid.

Can non-US citizens be coerced into giving up their passcode?
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