Slashdot Mirror
Apple Will No Longer Unlock Most iPhones, iPads For Police
SternisheFan writes with this selection from a story at the Washington Post: Apple said Wednesday night that it is making it impossible for the company to turn over data from most iPhones or iPads to police — even when they have a search warrant — taking a hard new line as tech companies attempt to blunt allegations that they have too readily participated in government efforts to collect user data. The move, announced with the publication of a new privacy policy tied to the release of Apple's latest mobile operating system, iOS 8, amounts to an engineering solution to a legal dilemma: Rather than comply with binding court orders, Apple has reworked its latest encryption in a way that makes it almost impossible for the company – or anyone else but the device's owner – to gain access to the vast troves of user data typically stored on smartphones or tablet computers. The key is the encryption that Apple mobile devices automatically put in place when a user selects a passcode, making it difficult for anyone who lacks that passcode to access the information within, including photos, e-mails, recordings or other documents. Apple once kept possession of encryption keys that unlocked devices for legally binding police requests, but will no longer do so for iOS8, it said in a new guide for law enforcement. "Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data," Apple said on its Web site. "So it's not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants for the extraction of this data from devices in their possession running iOS 8."
So everything is protected by a 4 digit passcode?
Wow... Impregnable.
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
This is how things are supposed to be. The legal system was designed for individuals "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects."
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
My luggage only has a 3 digit passcode, iphone is 10 times stronger encrypted!
It could be a 4096-bit private key with uberultra fugu-based quantum encryption:
http://xkcd.com/538/
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
No, you can, and should, use a much longer (and with more varied characters) passcode than that on iOS. The device actively tells you you should if you set up touch ID.
Yes, but you can easily set your device to wipe after 10 incorrect passcode entries. So, what this really means (assuming that Apple's statements are true) is that, in the event the police want access to your iDevice, their only option (unless they're willing to play 1000:1 odds) is to get the passcode from you.
Then they're served with another warrant ... one that obliges them to put a back door into either the individual device, or their whole infrastructure. Without informing users that such a warrant has been served.
Then what?
It's like a game of chess where the values of the piece can be unilaterally changed by one side.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Even if it is real. How long before there is an amendment to the patriot act stipulating that every encrypted gadget should have a master key and that master key should be provided to uncle sam?
Fill you luggage with locked iPhones.
Now that's secure!
i'm sure the cops can image your encrypted phone and try to break the encryption offline without risking loss of data. if they can't break it now, they will simply store the data for the next 10 years until they can and go back to it then. sort of like fingerprints, DNA or any other crime scene evidence
Not to mention their warrant canary is dead.
The pass code is limited to four numbers, but you can switch it to a longer pass phrase which may include any number of alphanumerical characters.
Can't wait to see how people spin this as anything but good news.
-- Complex passcodes take more computational power to crack.
-- More computational power takes more electricity.
-- More electrical use leads to burning more coal and oil which leads to global warming.
-- Global warming is bad.
Q.E.D - complex passcodes are bad.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Or switch to a pass phrase, which can be of any length.
Nothing prevents you to use 3rd party encryption on your Android phone (and I'm not speaking about 3rd party system)... and I seriously doubt that Google will be able to do anything about data crypted by 3rd party system.
On Android, you work on a system of service provider/consumer. Your contact list ? you've an application acting as contact provider and other as contact consumer (reader/writers).... If you want to protect them, nothing prevents you to use a different default contact provider which uses an encrypted container. Same for most of the phone features...
On iPhone, you can only trust Apple's word... like we did when it was about geolocation data...
Standard data forensics procedure is to write-protect any storage device which contains evidence, copy it bit-for-bit, and do all the decrypting and data analysis from the copy. The 10-try limit may protect your data from a random thief who lifts your phone, but the only way it's going to protect you from the government or any other technically-capable hacker is if Apple baked the limit into the flash memory-reading hardware.
And there's always this.
No because encryption is derived from passcode and device key which is in the cryptochip sillicon. You have to brute force those things 'online' due to this as anyone who has done iOS forensic will tell you. Now if you want to break that full key out of the blue offline then... hm. yeah.. see you in a million years.
Key escrow laws have been attempted before. And failed.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Or, they simply use a $5 wrench.
Life is not for the lazy.
I presume you wouldn't say it was "wrong" of the United States to crack the German and Japanese codes in WWII...
Aren't you rewriting history a little bit there? The USA didn't crack German codes. That was a bunch of Polish mathematicians, followed by British mathematicians and engineers. And when Americans make movies, three British sailors of whom two died getting secret materials out of a sinking German U-Boot suddenly become Americans!
Windows had "My Briefcase" years and years ago. Apple is still trying to catch up to that?!?
Standard data forensics procedure is to write-protect any storage device which contains evidence, copy it bit-for-bit, and do all the decrypting and data analysis from the copy. The 10-try limit may protect your data from a random thief who lifts your phone, but the only way it's going to protect you from the government or any other technically-capable hacker is if Apple baked the limit into the flash memory-reading hardware.
And there's always this.
You can put a complex password on your iPhone:
1) Settings->Passcode, enter your 4 digit passcode.
2) Flip the "Simple Passcode" switch.
3) Set your new arbitrary length complex password.
4) Enable the "Erase Data" setting which wipes the device after 10 incorrect password inputs.
5) Enjoy entering your complex password every time you want to access the phone.
The encryption on these iDevices and the Macs is non trivial to crack. Combine this encryption with a properly strong password and that wipe feature and even the Police would be shit out of luck. I know of a case where a guy resolutely refused to provide police with the password and crypto-key for his MacBook. The cops shipped the laptop to Cupertino who sent it back after a few weeks having failed to crack the drive encryption. The cracking would take longer than the expected lifespan of the universe. Your only hope of getting into a properly password protected and encrypted device be it an iDevice, an Android device or a Windows phone is if there happens to be some software vulnerability that enables you to bypass the login screen.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
So if I can get my hands on your phone for about 60 seconds I can brute force it to wipe it's contents?
and you forget the answer to your security question,
The presence of a security question on any service indicates immediately that they almost certainly have access if served with a warrant.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Blackberry used to be secure until they wanted to sell phones in India and the Indian government demanded a backdoor in order for them to sell phones there.
Will India now also refuse the sale of iOS8?
Or, they simply use a $5 wrench.
If they simply want the information, the $5 wrench works. If they want it to be admissible in court, then it doesn't work so well.
And how would you do step 1 or 2, exactly? Consider the possibility that the passcode protection could actually be enforced right down to the individual chip level, so trying to image the storage without the correct password would be futile, only giving you garbage at best.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
some of us are old enough to remember when 128 bit keys were considered unbreakable
So everything is protected by a 4 digit passcode?
Or your fingerprint, and where would the police get your fingerprint?
why is everybody so full of hate here.
For some, it's because Apple has the audacity to make tech easy for non-techies to use—that is, take away the exclusivity that some of the geeks here feel they should have on being able to use complex electronic devices.
For others, it's because Apple doesn't open up everything so that they can tinker with the innards and customize it to their exacting specifications (at least without jailbreaking).
In these cases, and some similar ones, there's a strong sense that Apple is not serving true geeks, but rather the masses, and therefore they're never going to do anything different that's not cosmetic—shiny, thin devices, pretty UI, that sort of thing. They must be incapable of real, complex, important stuff, because they don't "get" our favorite complex, important stuff.
For still others, though, it's not really about Apple, but rather a general sense that no large organization—company, government, or government agency—is going to act in the best interests of the people they are supposed to be serving (in one way or another), and that they will almost gleefully lie about their nefarious intentions in order to lull the sheeple into a false sense of security.
And sure, it's possible that Apple's lying. That up until now, they have been open about being willing to give your information to the Feds when they ask for it, but now they'll just do it under the table. But that really doesn't pass Occam's Razor. It doesn't even pass Hanlon's Razor—it requires Apple to be both malicious and stupid. But a lot of people believe Apple is exactly that, because Apple's not Their Team—it's Them, not Us, and therefore any and all negative traits are safe to attribute to it.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
The cracking would take longer than the expected lifespan of the universe.
The obvious solution is inter parallel universe travel. We find the parallel universe in which the only difference is that the suspect didn't lock his/her phone and get the data there. Problem solved.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Yes, that is true...
But it isn't logarithmic, it is exponential...
A 256-bit encryption isn't twice as hard as 128-bit, and a 4096-bit is beyond silly.
There might be fault with the method of encryption, perhaps a hack or a mistake in the code, but you won't brute force 4096-bit encryption. It would take more energy than exists in the universe, go look it up. :)
It was designed for syncing a folder on your computer with a floppy disks. Now that we have flash drives, seek times aren't so bad and you can operate on them directly (or use cloud storage).
The feature's technically present even in Windows 7. Just add a desktop.ini file to any folder with the following lines:
[ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={85BBD920-42A0-1069-A2E4-08002B30309D}
ConfirmFileOp=0
Apparently there's a way to re-enable it in Windows 8, too.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
id think in even a few hundred years our best encryption would be trivial to break.
Not without huge advances in theoretical mathematics, no. We have encryption that would take longer to crack than the heat death of the Universe, even if every atom in it were a modern computer.
On the other hand, advances in the factoring of large numbers, could, for example, make some modern encryption method a lot more vulnerable. But I am told, by people who do research on that topic at MIT and Caltech, that momentous breakthroughs in that area are unlikely - modest improvements, certainly, earth-shattering advancements, no.
No good deed goes unpunished...
> no court in the U.S. has the authority to order a specific change to a product.
Not that they'd actually order that a backdoor be developed, but most courts can order specific performance. In many states, small claims courts are limited to monetary damages, but any other court of general jurisdiction can issue a specific performance order. You see this used in custody cases where the father is ordered to provide health insurance, for example. It's also common to have specific performance ordering a government official to take some action, such as issuing a title for a car that didn't have the normal documentation. In general, a court can order whatever the court thinks is equitable, subject only to the prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment ".
What does "Most" mean? Sounds like another loophole..
You can do that. You can enter emergency contact info in the health app which is available from the lock screen with no password. It can also include allergies, insurance information and other things useful to first responders.
Mike Mangino
mmangino@acm.org
The same way you clone any encrypted container. You know you can image an encrypted drive? You still won't be able to access the data without decrypting it, if it's truly encrypted unlike the early iOS-we-say-it's-encrypted-but-it's-really-not fiasco, but you do have a copy of the drive.
The pass code is limited to four numbers, but you can switch it to a longer pass phrase which may include any number of alphanumerical characters.
Actually this is no longer true as of iOS 8 - it wants you to set up a complex pass code by default.
#DeleteChrome
There are not different keys for every file, or if there are they are tied to a master key. The only way you can view an encrypted device with a single passphrase is because that single passphrase is tied to a single master key somewhere.
iOS uses a different encryption key for every file. One component of the encryption key is stored in the directory, one part comes from the device encryption key.
Or, they simply use a $5 wrench.
Don't be ridiculous, we're talking about the US government and not some thugs.
It would be a $5,000 wrench.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
No, because I don't get my historical information from fictional films. I watched a fictional movie last year about giant robots landing on the moon but I didn't get upset at Hollywood for claiming that giant robots beat us there. Only a moron gets angry at a fiction writer for writing fiction. Now, if you had said "Ken Burns made a WW2 documentary and got the following facts wrong..." Then yes, I would say you had a legitimate gripe at Ken Burns (and not at "Hollywood"), but I would just tell you to stop watching Ken Burns films.
The whole argument that "Hollywood" always gets history wrong in favor of the Americans when making fictional films is just petty jingoistic whining. If it really bothers you that much, go make your own films and set the record straight.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
When you speak of 4096 bit encryption, you are generally talking about RSA keys. RSA keys do not share the same "strength per bit" as symmetric keys like AES-128.
Most folks say that AES-128 is about equivalent to RSA/3072, and Elliptic Curve would need to be 256 bits to be roughly equivalent to AES-128.
The big upcoming problem with RSA is that the number of bits needed per key goes up rapidly as you need to get to stronger key sizes. To get something equivalent to AES-256, you would need a 15360 bit RSA key. Which makes Elliptic Curve crypto more interesting because you only need about a 512 bit EC key to match AES-256 strength.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
They'll use the usual police state nonsense:
"Think of the children!"
"Apple is letting criminals hide their crimes!"
This is exactly the point. Police can serve a warrant on a person, but they can't take the legal wrench to apple.
For the AES encryption used on the iOS flash, you need advances in the discrete logarithm problem, not factoring large numbers. There’s no RSA involved in protecting the flash contents.
Additionally, there’s no known way to make the boot loader just dump an image of the encrypted flash for you to start brute forcing on. You’d need to disassemble the phone, desolder the flash chips, and read them out in another circuit.
That’s certainly do-able, but not something that can be done to a phone that needs to continue to remain intact for any reason. IE they couldn’t just dump your phone while you’re in the tank & give it back to you when you’re released, planning to work on it later.
You can also set it to erase everything if the passcode is wrong more than ten times.
You don't have to enter the passcode every time if you've got a TouchID device. When my new phone shows up, I have a 13-digit code memorized from when I was a kid (long story). I'll input that once a day, and use the scanner to unlock the device the rest of the time.
Really you only need a 6-digit passcode to be exceptionally safe, but it's honestly easier for me to remember this particular code than something shorter.
Loading the CPU with custom software would either require a ROM-level vulnerability in the bootloader or for Apple to sign your alternate firmware to load in.
To my knowledge there have been no bootloader vulns since the early production runs of the iPhone 4S. All jailbreaks since that time have depended on vulnerabilities later in the software stack. The bootloader will not accept a firmware older than the one currently installed on it, so downgrading to exploit since-fixed bugs isn’t possible.
There’s no existing precedent that I know of, but conceivably Apple could be compelled to sign your mal-firmware. Then you’re down to the bigger problem. The bootloader only maintains the user flash session key in the cryptochip during upgrades if the user’s key is available. If you don’t have the key, installing any firmware blows away the cryptochip’s contents, destroying any ability to access the user flash contents. So the ROM-based bootloader won’t allow you to update the OS to install your alternative version without either clearing user flash or having the user’s key in the first place.
The software that’s on device does implement brute force attacks and (if so-configured) blows away keys in the cryptochip after 10 bad guesses (with an increasing back-off delay before accepting additional guesses after the first six, making it time consuming for someone to DoS your phone by guessing keys until it wipes).
So it’s not possible to load software that ignores the brute force check without wiping what you’re trying to extract in the first place, even with Apple’s (compelled) assistance.
That works for basic access passwords since the only check is "is it right yes/no?" at one particular entry point (the login screen.) You can reset that password and they only have to "update" the one location (their password hash file.)
Encryption is a whole different beast as you're effectively password protecting every single byte on your device. Simply changing the access password won't change those bytes.
So unless they're storing your password in plaintext (or reversibly encrypted,) or they've built a master key into their algorithm then no, they can't recover your data even if they reset your password for you.
No major company with any sanity would store user passwords in a recoverable form -- way too much chance of a rogue employee or a hacker getting their hands on the file and open them up to massive lawsuits.
Similar issues if they store a "hard to get" copy of the password right on your phone -- it won't take very long before someone figures that out and how to access it and then you may as well turn off the password feature all together for all the security it would give you.
Master passwords are a little bit more likely.. not because they're any saner (for the same reasons) but its a little easier to control a single key stored in a vault somewhere than it is to control a (probably distributed) password file that needs to be accessed regularly. Of course having it in a vault is great for something like the CSS or the PS3 master keys (which were both cracked eventually of course) but less good when your level 1 or even level 2 tech support need to use it periodically..
Too bad for "standard forensics" that the passcode is mixed in with a hardware-specific key baked into the SOC. So you'll first need to be able to run arbitrary code on the individual's phone itself in order to keep guessing beyond the limit. That's going to require a significantly more intrusive examination.
Case law is slightly conflicted in different US Federal districts, but the majority are that you can’t be compelled to provide your decryption keys. They’d need evidence to throw you in prison for 30 years, and your lack of providing the key is NOT evidence.
Recent statements made by several SCOTUS justices relating to warrantless phone searches suggest that as cases involving compelled key disclosure reach the Supreme Court, they will likely be decided in favor of the defendant. IE that the 5th Amendment protects you from being compelled to turn over an encryption key to information that would be used against you.
The legal situation outside the US is of course different. In the UK in particular, you CAN be compelled to provide the key under penalty of indefinite detention.
I can tell you that Law Enforcement kits can break encryption on IOS devices (new releases usually within a month of a major IOS release). They will be unable to unlock the phone regardless. I have never gone through Apple to get into an IPhone and simply use my forensics kit with a search warrant to break into the phone and do a physical extraction of it. They also say they wont unlock the phone to you however they never said anything about not giving access to complete icloud backups of imessaging and texts and everything else now did they?
I think you meant to say:
But it isn't linear, it is exponential...
The US courts CAN compel you to disclose your keys in some specific circumstances. The canonical example was when child porn was seen on a screen and the owner managed to then turn the laptop(?) off. When rebooted it could not be seen because it was encrypted.
In that case the courts held that because the government already knew (had seen) that the kiddie porn was present they where not forcing the owner to disclose something unknown. So they could force him to hand over his keys.
Yes I'm sure that anybody who doesn't want their data to be read by the authorities won't be able to afford to buy an iPhone with TouchID.
5) Enjoy entering your complex password every time you want to access the phone.
Ahh...
+1 to you... :)
Yea, you're right...
FOR GOD'S SAKE.
I know you guys hate Apple, and that's fine. But do try to use your brain a little bit. Do you honestly believe that the flash storage is encrypted with a 4-digit numeric key? Of course it isn't, it's encrypted with a 256-bit AES key that's generated using a per-device hardware key and the passcode (which can be much longer than a 4-digit pin if you can be bothered to type it in every time you use the phone). If you pull the hardware out of the phone, then this is the key you're going to be cracking.
Good luck with that.
AES-256 will never be able to be brute force broken.
Never.
And I don't use that word lightly.
The energy to check all the possible keys doesn't exist.
You would have to come up with a way to run the math using energy from outside our known universe.
http://www.reddit.com/r/theydi...
Maybe instead of searching for nudies on their phone and drugs in their car, these samaritans should consider calling a fucking ambulance and doing some basic first aid.
A double post because I wanted to follow up on something.
I know you guys hate Apple,
I dont hate Apple. I think they are really good at many things, including user interface, and they make some fine products.
What I absolutely hate is the culture around their products that assumes that theyre always doing something new and different, and that anyone who doesnt think their products are magical is a naysayer. Full disk encryption is a problem that has been solved for 15-20 years now and everyone does it the same way, because that way works. The claim that Im getting it wrong when you apparently have NO IDEA what the threat model for attacking FDE is, is mind boggling.
Do you honestly think that Apple understands crypto better than the folks at Truecrypt, or dmcrypt / LUKS? That somehow their magical system makes them immune to attacks on the passphrase? Has it occurred to you that there can be threat models that are entirely dependent on the user, and no magical engineering on the part of Apple can possibly fix?
No, of course not; I point out a real world, well known way of attacking FDE, and clearly Im an Apple hater. Heres a news flash: Its a company that makes devices. I really do not care day to day what devices they make-- just dont try to tell me that theyve solved problems that noone else has managed to solve yet (like weak passphrases in encryption schemes) because they havent.