Mobile 'Remote Wipe' Thwarts Secret Service

bennyboy64 writes "Smartphones that offer the ability to 'remote wipe' are great for when your device goes missing and you want to delete your data so that someone else can't look at it, but not so great for the United States Secret Service, ZDNet reports. The ability to 'remote wipe' some smartphones such as BlackBerry and iPhone was causing havoc for law enforcement agencies, according to USSS special agent Andy Kearns, speaking on mobile phone forensics at a security conference in Australia."

Comments

Aww..

[Jaysyn]

My heart bleeds for these guys. Really, it does.

Re:Aww..

[h00manist]

My heart bleeds for these guys. Really, it does.

Your free flight to a remote dark room is on its way.

Re:Aww..

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, I love photography!

Re:Aww..

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Umm... Because it suggests that the phones (though not the networks) aren't backdoored?

The fact that the Secret Service, who ought to be a bit sharper than Joe Beat Cop, haven't mastered the art of "turning the phone off before it gets wiped" doesn't strike me as a good thing. However, the fact that "wipe" means "wipe" not "Wipe, unless the state says otherwise" does.

Re:Aww..

[daid303]

I might have been playing to much Commandos, The Saboteur, Wolvenstein and Day of Defeat. But when you say S.S. I think about a whole different kind of 'cop'.

Scary enough, you see them the same way as the original S.S. was seen by the public many years ago.

Re:Aww..

[palegray.net]

It's okay. Hopefully they'll still have plenty of information from tapping phone calls that were already placed.

Re:Aww..

[Em Emalb]

The fact that the Secret Service, who ought to be a bit sharper than Joe Beat Cop, haven't mastered the art of "turning the phone off before it gets wiped" doesn't strike me as a good thing. However, the fact that "wipe" means "wipe" not "Wipe, unless the state says otherwise" does.

Right, because the S.S. never works with local law enforcement,etc, etc.

Frankly, I give a shit if the S.S. can read the information on my phone if they detain me. First, in order for me to be detained by the S.S., I'd have to be in a pretty precarious situation in the first place.

I'm waiting for the "first they came for the _____" responses. The reality is, the S.S. doesn't give a damn about the average person. They're concerned with counterfeiters and threats to dignitaries and the President. If having the information off the phone helps them capture counterfeiters and helps to uncover terroristic plots against US dignitaries, fine by me.

Re:Aww..

[KingSkippus]

...if they are unable to gain access to these phones before they're remotely wiped, that's a bad thing. I don't understand why people think this is a good thing.

Because if they are able to gain access to these phones before they're remotely wiped, then other people can gain access to your phone before it can be remotely wiped. 99.999% of those people do not have your best interest at heart. Probably 99.9% of them are thieves and criminals trying to screw you over. 0.099% of them are law enforcement officials overstepping the bounds of what is allowed by law. (But it would cost you tens or hundreds of thousands in legal fees to prove it in court, and you'd risk the chance that you get an idiot judge who sets a bad precedent for everyone else.)

If we're lucky, 0.001% of them have anything to do with the president or counterfeiters, but really, I think that's being generous.

Re:Aww..

[Mister Whirly]

Right, becasue everyone knows that mistakes are never made by law enforcement.

I mean if you don't have anything to hide, why should anyone be worried?

Re:Aww..

[nicolas.kassis]

Except the S.S. aren't the only one who could benefit from this information. I'm sorry for them but the reality is that the function is performing as advertised. The S.S. having a backdoor is just that much easier for crackers to get in your phone. Remote wipe is an important feature now that our phones hold much more info then they used to.

Re:Aww..

[Sir_Lewk]

I'm waiting for the "first they came for the _____" responses. The reality is, the S.S. doesn't give a damn about the average person. They're concerned with counterfeiters and threats to dignitaries and the President. If having the information off the phone helps them capture counterfeiters and helps to uncover terroristic plots against US dignitaries, fine by me.

OH RIGHT!!! I forgot about dem darn tooten turrists! Thanks for reminding me!

Seriously though, you are in idiot. If you want to trust the government like that then fine, but you are a minority in this respect.

Re:Aww..

[Chris Mattern]

Because they want to keep it in an unchanged state until it can be handed to the forensics techs. Turning off the power will wipe anything in the ram. Now they have to make the decision to kill the power or risk a remote wipe.

Or they can have Faraday cage boxes made up and pop the phone into a box as part of the standard procedure of picking it up. Putting the phone into a locked box as soon as it's picked up is good for the evidence chain anyways.

Re:Aww..

[bickerdyke]

the OTHER kind of darkroom.

Re:Aww..

[commodore64_love]

>>>Frankly, I give a shit if the S.S. can read the information on my phone if they detain me. First, in order for me to be detained by the S.S., I'd have to be in a pretty precarious situation in the first place.

Yeah. After all the government never, never arrests innocent people and throws them in jail to rot. So you're right. Nothing to fear.

/end sarcasm

Here's an interesting case where government cops entered the wrong house (therefore an illegal warrantless search) to do a drug raid. Of course there were no drugs at the address (again: wrong house), but the man inside was scared to death so he ran to his bedroom and hid for fear of his life. When the intruders entered, he acted in self-defense of his life and killed the intruder. Then he was charged with murder and sentenced to life for murder.

That man is completely innocent, but nobody seems to give two shits. He's already spent a decade in jail. It could have just as easily been you.

http://reason.com/archives/2006/10/01/the-case-of-cory-maye

Re:Aww..

[element-o.p.]

If you want to trust the government like that then fine, but you are a minority in this respect.

Unfortunately, I doubt he is.

Re:Aww..

[mysidia]

Sometimes phones are configured to self-erase, if turned off, if the battery is removed, or if an incorrect password is entered 10 times. So pressing the power button can actually initiate a secure erase.

Re:Aww..

[ehrichweiss]

And to make matters worse, if the police raided your home and killed you and your family "by accident", they'd be all like "oops, my bad" and that'd be the last you'd hear of it. Try to defend yourself and you're committing some form of crime whether that be murder or "obstruction of justice"..

Re:Aww..

[geekoid]

" I'd have to be in a pretty precarious situation in the first place.

in thir view, yes. Not necessarily true in reality. It does give them a way to go hunting for indicators of other crimes. Not crimes, just some pre set 'indicator'

for example:
if the believed 13% of people who visits X site commit y crime, and you happened to have been to that site, they will detain you. Even if it has nothing to do with why they have the phone.

" The reality is, the S.S. doesn't give a damn about the average person. T"

And that's the problem.

" They're concerned with counterfeiters and threats to dignitaries and the President. "

really?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS_Cyberpunk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jackson_Games,_Inc._v._United_States_Secret_Service

Imagine if that was today. They would have taken a record of every person the called, and then investigate all those people.

Do you need to actually live in a fascist state before you get it?
Talk to people who lived in the soviet union during the 70s. All that was done under the guise of making people safer and catching 'bad guys'.

You need to stop living under the pretense that only guilty people get investigated.

Re:Aww..

[geekoid]

In general the government is fine. The US government is one of the most trustworthy.

That doesn't make it perfect, and that doesn't mean it always will be.

I support remote wipe and peoples rights. Over all, the US government does a pretty damn good job for it's citizens.

Re:Aww..

[Sir_Lewk]

If you want to trust the government like that...

I trust the government to some extent in my day to day life, everyone does. I just don't trust the government in this context.

Re:Aww..

[Fulcrum of Evil]

And hiding in the bedroom can be seen as attempting to avoid a deadly confrontation. Killing the intruder when he backs you into a corner is then the action of last resort.

Re:Aww..

[GameboyRMH]

Now his other love organ is going to bleed x_x

Re:Aww..

[barberousse]

You have your history all messed up. The United States Secret Service was formed in 1865. The SS from WW2? 1925.

Re:Aww..

[aunticrist]

Depends on where you live, but most places that even have conceal and carry also have a fun thing called the Castle Doctrine, which means no lawyer can come close to successfully arguing your point above. In fact, if you retreat to the furthest part in your home and have to wait there to defend yourself, and end up doing so, most states with the CD will rule it a clean kill after an investigation and you can go on with your life.

Secure wipes?

[Infiniti2000]

Are they secure wipes or can data still be gleaned?

Re:Secure wipes?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they secure wipes or can data still be gleaned?

I don't know about iphone, but blackberry wipes securely. The blackberry platform has been tested, audited & certified by many government & private agencies:

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/ataglance/security/certifications.jsp

The iphone has been tested, audited & certified by... nobody.

But there is one advantage to the iphone - since you can't take out the battery, it remains on the network for a longer time to receive the wipe signal.

Re:Secure wipes?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Depends on the phone model, I suspect.

My understanding is that the accepted "proper" way to do it is to have all the user-relevant data on the phone stored in encrypted form, with a stored key making it transparently accessible. That way, when the "wipe" command comes, you just have to nuke the key, which takes mere moments, rather than a potentially quite large block of Flash, possibly hiding behind one or more controller chips that are abstracting things, and remapping, and doing other stuff that interferes with your ability to wipe the data hard enough to resist an adversary willing to physically inspect the memory chips, or even a raw dump of their contents.

If a phone implements that correctly, any three-letter-agency without a magic quantum computer stolen from the Greys isn't going to be able to do much about it. If there is some nasty flaw in their implementation, or if they use an inferior system of some sort, it is quite possible that fairly trivial attacks will reveal most or all of the information.

Re:Secure wipes?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this? Multitasking and background processes on my iPhone?

Re:Secure wipes?

[mini me]

iPhone also requires having a MobleMe account

Or an Exchange account. Which can include the use of z-push, if Exchange is not your thing.

Re:Secure wipes?

[natehoy]

You've always had multitasking and background processes of stuff Apple writes into the OS. It's third-party apps that don't allow multitasking.

Plus, if the phone is being wiped, I don't think any other processes are going to be running. :)

Re:Secure wipes?

[GameboyRMH]

Plus even if the attacker's face is only 10 pixels wide in the grainy, dark, blurry photo they can zoom it right up, run an "enhance filter" (proprietary CSI stuff) on it a few times and see his face in high resolution.

Hm

[pudge]

The Secret Service just need a Faraday Cage Fanny Pack.

Re:Hm

[davidbrit2]

They have one, apparently.

"Hopefully our officers are putting the cell phones in a Faraday bag that is shielded, pulling the battery [out] and turning them off [before] getting them into the shielded laboratory."

Re:Hm

[Anonymous Coward]

"Hopefully our officers are putting the cell phones in a Faraday bag that is shielded, pulling the battery [out] and turning them off [before] getting them into the shielded laboratory."

Deep below the earths crust where an army of techie-like-gremlins work tirelessly in a labrinthy maze of dusty, dirty laboratories consisting of ancient testing equipment made before the dawn of man. Only Down here, where only the flicker of overhead lamps shine shadows into the darkness, is justice done.

Re:Hm

[jimicus]

No it doesn't. It requires a simple, mindless process: supply all agents with shielded bags for mobile phones, instruct them that the process for mobile phone evidence is it goes in the special bag and does not come out before it gets to the lab.

And if there's one thing most law enforcement agencies worldwide are extremely good at, it's simple mindless processes.

Gist of the story

[thesaurus]

If officers don't follow evidence procedures correctly, evidence gets screwed up. And it doesn't happen very often.

"Sometimes you'll get a cellphone that comes in that is wiped, [but] it's not all that common," he said. Agents were trained to incapacitate devices, but Kearns cautioned that not all enforcement agencies had the same knowledge.

Re:Gist of the story

[oldspewey]

So basically, this is crime scene preservation training 101. If an officer stumbles around a physical murder scene, eating hot chicken wings, randomly picking up pieces of evidence, and leaving delicious buffalo sauce all over everything, he will destroy the physical evidence before it can be expertly analyzed. But hopefully with adequate training, he learns how to take adequate precautions.

Re:Gist of the story

[torgis]

Sounds like a sinfully delicious crime.

from the cry-them-a-river dept.

[syrinx]

So the Slashdot groupthink's anti-law enforcement stance has extended to the Secret Service now? Which part are we in favor of: counterfeiting money or assassinating the president? Personally I'll go ahead and take a bold anti-counterfeiting/anti-assassination position and say that this is a bad thing.

Re:from the cry-them-a-river dept.

[maxume]

It's a bit much to read that as a blanket anti-law enforcement comment, it simply means that Taco feels that the law enforcement needs of the Secret Service are subordinate to his right to secure his possessions.

Re:from the cry-them-a-river dept.

[bzzfzz]

I think most Slashdotters will agree that the Service is well within their rights to perform forensic analysis on any device that they obtain during a lawful search, whether conducted under a warrant, incidental to an arrest, or based on probable cause. I do not believe that the Service suffers a poor track record regarding extralegal searches as does INS and some other agencies.

On the other hand, the availability of an effective "remote wipe" of a personal device is a rightful means of exercising freedom.

It's about balance.

Remote wipe requires remote signal, yes?

[DdJ]

As I understand it, doing any of the following should be able to prevent a remote wipe from happening:

* put it into "airplane mode"
* remove the SIM (assuming GSM with no wifi)
* remove the battery

If you need the SIM or battery to get the data off the device, you can then take it to a faraday cage and put the SIM or battery back in once you're sure no signal can get to the phone. Yes?

Anything that protected against these "attacks" would also make it so the phone's user couldn't access their data when the signal strength was sufficiently poor. Which some folks might choose as their configuration, but then they're open to a new kind of denial-of-service attack.

Remote wipe is useful when you want to prevent a random schlub (eg. pickpocket, guy at bar) from getting data off a randomly-acquired phone (eg. "iPhone HD"). I do not think it's useful for preventing a professional with intent from getting data off a phone they're targeting specifically because of its data. Am I wrong?

Proper procedure

[cdrguru]

Well, if they followed proper procedures, this wouldn't be a problem.

Walk around the exhibits at any forensic conference and you will see a variety of devices for making sure this does not happen. You can use any of them - they all work. Anything from the Paraben "tent" to the HTCI "glove box". The idea is that you put the phone into a shielded container where you can operate on it to collect evidence.

When the phone is collected you have the choice: either remove the battery or put the phone into a shielded bag. No special shielded bags handy? Then you have to remove power and hope the phone doesn't lock itself. Don't want to deal with a locked phone? Get some shielded bags then.

This isn't a real problem with phones, it is a real problem with having the right knowledge and procedures. It shouldn't even be a matter of training anymore.

Re:Proper procedure

[natehoy]

My Blackberry locks itself after 15 minutes of non-use. The key to decrypt the data on the phone is itself encrypted by the password (8 characters minimum) that I use to unlock the phone. Screw that password up ten times and the phone wipes. It also locks itself on power-up.

About the only real option would be to either have someone press a button on the phone every 10 minutes (assuming it's not already locked when taken), which would be a real trick when the thing is in a Faraday cage or bag.

The very same things that make the Blackberry and newer iPhones attractive to businesses (and Government agencies, for that matter) are what make it undesirable from a forensics point of view. These things are designed so they can be configured to be extremely paranoid, and are very tough to crack.

And therein lies the problem. If you allow your citizens their own security, you can't see everything they do, and that makes it harder to catch the wrongdoers. If you want absolute information to catch wrongdoers, perhaps a democratic republic with constitutional protection of its citizens is not for you.

skilled experts huh

[TRRosen]

stumped by a technological problem that can be solved by carrying a piece of tinfoil.