Slashdot Mirror
Mining iPhones and iCloud For Data With Forensic Tools
SternisheFan points out an article that walks us through the process of using forensic tools to grab data from iPhones and iCloud using forensic tools thought to have been employed in the recent celebrity photo leak. There are a number of ways to break into these devices and services depending on what kind of weakness an attacker has found. For example, if the attacked has possession of a target's iPhone, a simple command-line toolkit from Elcomsoft uses a jailbreak to bypass the iPhone's security. A different tool can extract iCloud data with access to a computer that has a local backup of a phone's data, or access to a computer that simply has stored credentials.
The discusses also details a method for spoofing device identification to convince iCloud to restore data to a device mimicking the target's phone. The author concludes, "Apple could go a long way toward protecting customer privacy just by adding a second credential to encrypt stored iCloud data. An encryption password could be used to decrypt the backup when downloaded to iTunes or to the device, or it could be used to decrypt the data as it is read by iCloud to stream down to the device."
The discusses also details a method for spoofing device identification to convince iCloud to restore data to a device mimicking the target's phone. The author concludes, "Apple could go a long way toward protecting customer privacy just by adding a second credential to encrypt stored iCloud data. An encryption password could be used to decrypt the backup when downloaded to iTunes or to the device, or it could be used to decrypt the data as it is read by iCloud to stream down to the device."
Apple could go a long way toward protecting customer privacy just by adding a second credential to encrypt stored iCloud data. An encryption password could be used to decrypt the backup when downloaded to iTunes or to the device, or it could be used to decrypt the data as it is read by iCloud to stream down to the device.
I forgot my iPhone password, and those lousy Apple folks refused to reset it for me. They just said some kind of technobabble about encryption and security. Why did they make iPhones harder to use? Isn't Apple supposed to be easy to figure out?
You can't have it both ways. I encrypt all my sensitive data that I back up to the cloud, but I also keep copies of the key in safe places so that when my house burns down I don't lose access to my offsite backups along with it. I wouldn't expect the average iCloud user to appreciate the need for this, and neither does Apple, so their backups aren't encrypted.
I skimmed the article, so I may have missed something, but the attacks that they're talking about generally entail having physical access to the phone, offline access to the phone's backup, phishing for passwords, or WiFi man-in-the-middle attacks *if* you can manage to spoof a computer that the iPhone trusts.
Which is to say, these aren't tremendous vulnerabilities on Apple's part. An attacker might be able to pull off a brute-force attack on your encrypted password-protected iPhone backup if they have an offline copy, if the password is weak. Well golly! Everyone better stop using their iPhone right away.
I do think Apple was a bit disingenuous regarding the "bad passwords" used by celebrities, given the iBrute tool apparently was able to keep trying different passwords against Find My iPhone without any sort of delay - a shortcoming Apple apparently fixed a few days back.
First, I don't think that it's known that the accounts were compromised with iBrute. People made the connection because the leak happened shortly after iBrute was announced, but there have been many suggestions that the photos had been acquired months or years before that. That makes it pretty unlikely that the accounts were accessed using iBrute. And Apple seems to deny that the accounts were accessed by exploiting "Find My iPhone".
Second, their comment about "bad passwords" is valid regardless, and would be valid even if the passwords had been accessed through brute force attacks. Brute force attack mitigation is specifically helpful in protecting accounts with weak passwords. If your password is strong enough, a brute force attack should still take a prohibitively long time to succeed.
From what I've been reading, it seems most likely that only some of these photos came from compromised iCloud accounts, and those accounts were probably not compromised due to an exploit of iCloud's service. There was just a news story about 5 million Gmail passwords being leaked, but it doesn't seem that it was from a exploit of Google's services either. Most likely, they were all acquired by phishing, or other non-technical attacks.