DOJ Says iPhone Is So Secure They Can't Crack It

zacharye writes "In the five years since Apple launched the iPhone, the popular device has gone from a malicious hacker's dream to law enforcement's worst nightmare. As recounted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review blog, a Justice Department official recently took the stage at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C. and told attendees that the beefed up security in iOS is now so good that it has become a nightmare for law enforcement."

Comments

Now you know for certain

[turbidostato]

The iPhone sports a master encryption key and DOJ has access to it.

Re:mod TFS

[Just Some Guy]

This is purely anecdotal, but... I was recently on a flight next to a highway patrolman flying back from a conference for computer detectives (my words, not his; I don't remember what the actual job title was). He showed me the modified Ubuntu distro DVD they were passing out - "Look, it has a password cracker!" "Is that John the Ripper?" "You've heard of that?!?" - and we had a pretty nice chat.

During the conversation, I mentioned that iPhones are encrypted now. I asked, "OK, hypothetically, suppose I'm a mafia drug dealer and you get my encrypted cell phone. How screwed am I?" He said that they'd get a subpoena for my house, show up with a search warrant, and read the backup off my Mac's hard drive, "and then we run this app [opens it to show it to me] and have full access to all your data!" I told him that was pretty impressive, "but... what if I turn on FileVault and encrypt my whole hard drive?" He looked like I'd kicked his puppy and said that most criminals aren't smart enough to do that, but in that case, yeah, there was nothing he could do.

Feel free to take that with a grain of salt, but I had a detective tell me - in an unguarded two-geeks-talking moment with no apparent motive or visible sign of deceit - that the only way they could recover an encrypted iPhone's contents was through examining the unencrypted backup from an unencrypted hard drive. Now this was a state highway patrol guy and not an NSA analyst, and maybe the higher-up guys have access to emergency use stuff they're not talking about, but my takeaway was that the state-level police really don't have any way to defeat the encryption.

Re:mod TFS

[Shakrai]

Now this was a state highway patrol guy and not an NSA analyst, and maybe the higher-up guys have access to emergency use stuff they're not talking about, but my takeaway was that the state-level police really don't have any way to defeat the encryption.

Without talking about bad implementation (e.g., weak passwords) or side channel attacks (keystroke loggers and the like) it seems exceedingly unlikely that any law enforcement agency would have the ability to defeat modern encryption algorithms. Even if the NSA has such an ability (the math geeks can comment on the likelihood of this) it would be far too valuable to waste on something as mundane as a criminal prosecution. National Security concerns trump the incarceration of child molesters, drug dealers, murderers, and other common criminals.

Far more interesting than the technical aspect will be the evolution of 5th amendment case law as it relates to encryption. There is no definitive legal precedent in the United States as to whether or not you can be compelled to disclose an encryption password. There have been a few cases that have danced around the edge of this question, but none have directly addressed it, nor have they made it to SCOTUS.