Hard to verify.
Perhaps if the FBI or other law enforcement continue to use the supposed vulnerability - eventually information obtained from a breached iPhone will appear in court as evidence..
U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
71–80 of 381 posts
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#72I feel like cases shouldn't be droppable unless both parties mutually agree, and the courts also must first agree.the courts should not agree if it's a case that could set a precedent that can have far reaching implications. What if next time, a smaller player than Apple was caught in this sort of case, and they can't fight back as easily? Then it'd be easier to setup a precedent favourable to one party. This seems l…
I feel like cases shouldn't be droppable unless both parties mutually agree
So if you made a bad decision to enter into litigation with someone, you're held to the consequences of that even after you've changed your mind? Unworkable in practice, and even in theory it's bad because you might wind up setting a precedent for someone whose case was similar to but better founded than yours.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#73I wish Apple would be able to recoup their legal costs from the DoJ -- the government shouldn't be allowed to force a company to spend money on defending their rights (using our "unlimited" tax dollars to do so), only to drop the case at the last minute making the entire case moot. Apple should be able to recover their legal costs.
Somewhat agree, but Apple DID have a court order they were fighting. They did choose to fight this legally adjudicated and issued order. The owner of the phone and the law enforcement both wanted the phone decrypted.
FWIW, I agree that privacy is ignored and should be respected, but apple chose this fight. I'm glad they did, but they knew it would cost them.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#74Who wants to take bets on how? My bet is they copied the flash, and are iterating passcode guesses until it slows down too much (or implodes, however it's configured) and then they reflash and iterate again. And it was only a 4 digit passcode, so it was pretty easy to do this. The next bet is whether they find anything relevant? My bet is no. Next bet after that is whether they admit it? My bet is they won't. But the…
that's not how the security enclave works as far as i know, you can't copy that part off and so you can't copy off + bruteforce the drive?
You can't copy that part off to another device but you can reflashing the chip on the device.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#75I wonder what the government's obligation is to Apple, to let them know the nature of the vulnerability.
Legally none. Ethically? I think it's worth debating what sort of public trust should be granted to government that sits on an exploit.
But it also requires knowing how they did it. I think most likely they copied the flash, started iterating passcodes, and then reflashed the phone everytime they ran out of attempts. That's sufficiently obvious (to me anyway) that it's not much of an exploit worth documenting and also there's no software fix for such a thing. You'd need to put the passcode attempt counter on some separate piece of hardware that either can't be externally read or reflashed.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#76Who wants to take bets on how? My bet is they copied the flash, and are iterating passcode guesses until it slows down too much (or implodes, however it's configured) and then they reflash and iterate again. And it was only a 4 digit passcode, so it was pretty easy to do this. The next bet is whether they find anything relevant? My bet is no. Next bet after that is whether they admit it? My bet is they won't. But the…
that's not how the security enclave works as far as i know, you can't copy that part off and so you can't copy off + bruteforce the drive?
I don't think the iPhone in question was of a generation that had the security enclave, was it?
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#77Who wants to take bets on how? My bet is they copied the flash, and are iterating passcode guesses until it slows down too much (or implodes, however it's configured) and then they reflash and iterate again. And it was only a 4 digit passcode, so it was pretty easy to do this. The next bet is whether they find anything relevant? My bet is no. Next bet after that is whether they admit it? My bet is they won't. But the…
that's not how the security enclave works as far as i know, you can't copy that part off and so you can't copy off + bruteforce the drive?
From what I understand, the iPhone in question is an older model, without the secure enclave.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#78I suspect they didn't actually crack it. I think it's likely that they just realized the losing battle they were fighting. It sounded like a lot of public sentiment was against the FBI and they were unlikely to win the case (and it seemed like the information wasn't vital to them anyway) so they just gave an excuse to drop the case. This has an additional benefit: rather than having the "boundaries" here be defined b…
I'm not sure about public sentiment - have you seen polls about it?
My take is that HN crowd is completely unrepresentative vis-a-vis the opinion of majority on this issue.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#79I wish Apple would be able to recoup their legal costs from the DoJ -- the government shouldn't be allowed to force a company to spend money on defending their rights (using our "unlimited" tax dollars to do so), only to drop the case at the last minute making the entire case moot. Apple should be able to recover their legal costs.
While I agree, the counterargument will likely be that all of Apple's lawyers are on salary and as such Apple's legal costs would be no different with or without the court proceedings.
Re: U.S. Drops California Case Against Apple After Accessing iPhone
#80This claim seems dubious at best. There's no proof that they got access, and it's in their best interest to claim they did. On one hand, I'm not totally sure we should assume that they're not capable of gaining access to iPhones willy-nilly. On the other hand, I'm re-evaluating my security posture...
> This claim seems dubious at best. There's no proof that they got access, and it's in their best interest to claim they did. Wouldn't that be perjury? https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2778264-Apple-Status...
Sure, but what's a little perjury between government officials: http://www.salon.com/2013/06/12/how_james_clapper_will_get_a...