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Apple Tells US Judge It's 'Impossible' To Break Through Locks On New iPhones (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Apple told a U.S. judge that accessing data stored on a locked iPhone would be "impossible" with devices using its latest operating system, but the company has the "technical ability" to help law enforcement unlock older phones. Apple's position was laid out in a brief filed late Monday, after a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn, New York, sought its input as he weighed a U.S. Justice Department request to force the company to help authorities access a seized iPhone during an investigation. In court papers, Apple said that for the 90 percent of its devices running iOS 8 or higher, granting the Justice Department's request "would be impossible to perform" after it strengthened encryption methods.
It is their duty when the court orders it so as part of evidence gathering. Law 101, dude.
Oh, and because it could fall under 5th amendment right to not incriminate yourself.
Unless you use the fingerprint lock... which courts have ruled isn't protected by the 5th.
> do your homework
ha, at least read Apple's security whitepaper if you're going to tell other people to do so. Newer iPhones (5s and later) have trusted hardware - older ones don't, it's that simple. You need a certain OS level to use it effectively, obviously.
I don't even own any iOS devices and I know this. It's no crime to not stay advised of the market, but if you're going to castigate others you really need to be well-informed.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
In iOS 9 ( at least)you have to enter you passcode once every 48 hours even with finger print lock.
I have gone a weekend without entering the passcode and suddenly couldn't use my fingerprint anymore.
I wish this part was better documented because it then becomes trivially easy to hit the wall between mandatory unlock and the passcode timer.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
OS 9 - the current version runs on devices as old as the 4S. I believe the 4S was introduced in 2011. That's a lot longer than 2 years.
It doesn't matter when it was *introduced*, what matters is when it was *discontinued* -- because people were still buying them new up until that day.
The iphone 4 was discontinued in September 2013. That means, yes, ios9 was released before some iphone 4 users had their phones for 2 years.
And the iphone 4 wasn't eligible for ios8 either which was released a year ago.
So anyone who bought an iphone 4 in mid-late 2013 had support for their phone dropped within a few months of buying it.
Apple is pretty good about updates compared to most android vendors. But there is lots of room for improvement at Apple too.
Off the top of my head, is the boot ROM secured? Is there hardware encryption of the flash storage? Can the encryption be defeated by replacing hardware? For example can you simply remove the flash and put it on another phone to access it? Can you replace the boot ROM to trick the phone in thinking is being launched/loaded correctly?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Considering Apple includes a security co-processor it's not actually that easy. Touch ID wrapped keys are discarded after reboot, 48 hrs, or 5 failed attempts. This authentication method can also be disabled or never activated by the user.
Additionaly the root keys are only held in the co-prossesor and co-mingled with a UID (which even apple doesn't know) as well as the password. You can't begin a dictionary or pin attack without pulling out that UID (and cosidering the co-proccessor is running L4, the only way I know to do it is use nano-meter scale probes to spy on the hardware as it operates. The root of the file-system is encrypted by a key held only in the security co-processor, and the comingled password is used in a sort of chain of trust with the hardware key to secure file-metadata and per-file encyprion keys.
The firmware is designed to resist brute force, and apple fixes every known vulnerability to brute-force it discovers. The update mechanism requires the user password and cannot be rolled back to a prior vulnerable version, So apple can't provide a targeted device update to enable brute-forceing. At best the forensic team will have to sit on the device and hope a new vulnerability is discovered, and hope the data erase after 10 failed attempts was not enabled by the user.
https://www.apple.com/business...
Doesn't matter if it's encrypted. There are only 10,000 four-digit PIN combinations, and iPhones don't self-destruct after a certain number of tries. Pretty easy to brute force it.
Encryption is a necessary but not sufficient condition for security.
Apple recently moved to six-digit codes minimum for all phones, by default. With the presence of finger reader this is not much of an issue.
You can reduce or increase the security requirements of the passcode, but that is a personal choice.
Ref: https://support.apple.com/en-g...
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Yes, the security processor handles the passwords, the flash is encrypted with a sufficiently long symmetric key, brute force will take longer theoretically than the heat death of the universe, though every few years it seems to halve. The better attack is against the keychain in the active device. Depending on whether the user updated to a longer pin, then only a few days. But if they did enable a passphrase, then no, back to very long time beyond usefulness to LEOs, assuming they didn't choose correct-horse-battery-staple. Or something equally guessable from their private info.
And if they set wipe after ten wrong attempts, the security processor wipes the saved flash security key, and it's gone.
Yep. Starting with the iPhone 4, the flash media is encrypted with a key held in the device memory. That key is encrypted with the device UID key, the user's PIN (if enabled), and an instance key. The encryption key is changed when you select "Clear and Delete Everything" (it throws away the key and generates a new one, and re-encrypts it).
Moving the flash chip to a new device means you lack the per-device key which makes the flash inaccessible.
It's a fairly sophisticated system and short of implementation flaws, it's unbreakable.
Everybody things biometric ("fingerprint") security is everything! A fingerprint is one of the easiest thing for an attacker to obtain -- we leave them on everything we touch. It's a trivial matter to reproduce to the degree required by those cheap sensors. (Mythbusters did this years ago with a simple thumb scanner door lock. I've done the same with the optical scanner on many laptops -- without having to lick the paper, even.)