It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
1–10 of 35 posts
Re: It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
#2It's a pity that we (likely including the journalist) don't know more about how the cops got access to the iPhone beyond cloud backups: the one thing I'm taking away from this article is that passcodes can still be brute forced.
Re: It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
#3Does anyone know how much of a black box these cellebrite (or competitor) systems are?
Like if we could get some into the hands of the best reverse engineers in software and hardware, how difficult might it be to figure out the methods by which they gain access (aside from standard brute force and the like)? Are these unreleased zero day software exploits? Or something that anyone with enough knowledge of of the hardware system could implement with say a few million dollars and a small team of capable people? How are updates delivered? Do we know that the devices don't provide remote access to the vendor themselves?
Re: It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
#4Does anyone know how much of a black box these cellebrite (or competitor) systems are? Like if we could get some into the hands of the best reverse engineers in software and hardware, how difficult might it be to figure out the methods by which they gain access (aside from standard brute force and the like)? Are these unreleased zero day software exploits? Or something that anyone with enough knowledge of of the hard…
I don't imagine they are super hard, if they require wifi or usb or JTAG access, you can just dump it and figure out what it is doing, its not going to be any harder than reversing any other explotiation technique.
There would be thousands, if not tens of thousands of people in the world who can do it. Its much harder to create the exploit than to reverse it.
Re: It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
#5It's a pity that we (likely including the journalist) don't know more about how the cops got access to the iPhone beyond cloud backups: the one thing I'm taking away from this article is that passcodes can still be brute forced.
I think that bruteforcing the passcode is an unlikely attack vector, if they do "brute force it" it likely wont be with apples OS running, it would be some kind of custom attack.
Re: It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
#6It's a pity that we (likely including the journalist) don't know more about how the cops got access to the iPhone beyond cloud backups: the one thing I'm taking away from this article is that passcodes can still be brute forced.
I think that bruteforcing the passcode is an unlikely attack vector, if they do "brute force it" it likely wont be with apples OS running, it would be some kind of custom attack.
Image device -> run image in emulator -> try 5 passcodes -> get blocked -> reload image -> try 5 passcodes -> get blocked -> ... -> try 5 passcodes -> unlock phone.
Re: It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that bruteforcing the passcode is an unlikely attack vector, if they do "brute force it" it likely wont be with apples OS running, it would be some kind of custom attack.
Image device -> run image in emulator -> try 5 passcodes -> get blocked -> reload image -> try 5 passcodes -> get blocked -> ... -> try 5 passcodes -> unlock phone.
How do you Image an iphone device?
Re: It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
#8Is there any info yet on what kind of a phone the attacker had?
I still cannot find any article about this incident explicitly mentioning not even a specific model, but just whether it was Android or iOS at all.
While most of them keep referencing that old San Bernardino story where the attackers had an iPhone with an outdated security model even for the time of the incident (it was iPhone 5c iirc).
Re: It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
#9Does anyone know how much of a black box these cellebrite (or competitor) systems are? Like if we could get some into the hands of the best reverse engineers in software and hardware, how difficult might it be to figure out the methods by which they gain access (aside from standard brute force and the like)? Are these unreleased zero day software exploits? Or something that anyone with enough knowledge of of the hard…
A french youtuber got their hands on one and they say the device itself isn't protected at all ! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVx5auDj7Hs
Re: It's never been easier for the cops to break into your phone
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Image device -> run image in emulator -> try 5 passcodes -> get blocked -> reload image -> try 5 passcodes -> get blocked -> ... -> try 5 passcodes -> unlock phone.
How do you Image an iphone device?
Yeah, I had the same question. Because the grandparent comment explanation felt very much like the “…and then draw the rest of the owl” joke.