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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.
Sounds like a challenge!
I'm not sure the judicial conviction of this one suspect is worth granting law enforcement the unfettered ability to deputize anyone, any time it's convenient.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This is what encryption is for. Keeping data from the bad guys.
2) Why they want to avoid compelling the owner to unlock the phone is not stated.
Because legally compelling someone doesn't mean that they will unlock it, just that they'll face further punishment if they don't unlock it.
Oh, and because it could fall under 5th amendment right to not incriminate yourself. The conversation would be:
"Unlock this."
"Haha. No."
"Oh... well, then..."
but with more legal jargon.
Introducing the "Mom, Freedom, and Apple Pie Anti-Terrorist Act of 2015," that requires that all phone manufacturers build in government approved backdoors into every phone. And after a few Democrats and Rand Paul pretend to object to it, and briefly pretend to stand up against it, it will be approved by Congress with a unanimous vote and signed by the President (who will also pretend to give a flying fuck about privacy concerns by pinkie-swearing that it won't be abused).
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
On Android you can browse the Play Market on a desktop-browser and remotely install applications on your phone, with no confirmation or anything needed on the phone. This applies even if you have automatic updates disabled. Can you do the same on iOS-devices? If you can, then what would be stopping Apple from sending an small application this way to the device that unlocks it? This way there's no decryption needed, no passwords or anything, since they basically have a backdoor behind it all already, and Apple obviously does have access to all the low-level APIs and everything needed.
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.
And for convenience sake it only affects OLDER devices. Seriously, Troll? OS is software, Apple could patch it to a similar level of encryption, or better for the stock price - advise you to upgrade the hardware.
There is a military axiom about not defending indefensible positions. What would you have Apple do? Patch ancient 2nd and 3rd gen iPhones. Should Microsoft still be patching Windows 2000? Should Fedora still be patching FD12? And don't tell me that old phones being obsoleted because they are unable to run a new OS is some sinister plan by Apple to force users to buy new phones. I have a small pile of old Android phones and tablets that were orphaned (as in: Your device is incompatible with this version of Android) long before the end of their useful life because they could not handle the bloat of the new Android OS. Operating systems get upgraded, hardware becomes obsolete and some people do not bother to upgrade and that is a platform independent fact so if you want to rag on Apple try finding something better to complain about.
Apple is already a plenty attractive target. Plenty of prestige to be gotten from something like this already.
It's a straight up application of Schneier's Law:
-- Bruce Schneier
Someone might be able to break it, but if they can I doubt they'd talk about it.
Log in or piss off.
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> 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.
This sounds like a marketing scheme to get people to think:
"Oh nos! DOJ can break into my 'older phones' running 'iOS [7 or lower]'! Better buy the newest one!"
In most cases, if you root those devices there are third-party ROMS that can run much more recent versions of Android on them. No such pathway exists for apple users.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
How does an Apple customer verify that the claim is true?
Also you need the passcode upon booting. Simply reboot the phone before handing it over to the police.
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.
Very often, people confuse simple with simplistic. The nuance is lost on most. - Clement Mok
can you even root them anymore? I can't do it to my motoX
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER GIVE UP! "No limitations, no boundaries, there is no reason for them."
In other news, the Department Of Homeland Security declares that Apple is now an "Enemy of the State", and will be moving to seize all of their assets.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
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.
Really think of Carrier IQ, think of its ability to capture everything you do from key presses to app usage to files, to log everything. That is still present on every handset
Except iPhones for the last ~4 years.
http://allthingsd.com/20111201...
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Anything is possible.
So it's impossible for anything to be impossible?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Impossible for Apple means that if law enforcement came to them with a smartphone, Apple could not simply unlock it by themselves. They would require assistance of the owner of the smart phone to do it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Which version of the Moto X? I've got a shiney new (released end of Aug. 2015) Moto X Play (not available in US)... I have been following an XDA Developers thread where they are putting together a CM12 build for it. Seems they were able to root and replace the bootloader quite easily.
nt
My understanding is that the key, encrypted by the user's unlock code and device ID, is stored on a secure hardware module that is unique to the processor on that specific phone. You can configure the phone to erase the key after 10 wrong attempts. This makes it pretty much impossible to brute force the passcode via the OS. What I don't know is if the 10 tries setting is enforced at the hardware level or the OS. If it's only the OS, I suppose you could rig up something to interface with the hardware security module directly. If it is enforced in hardware, you'd have to somehow extract the password-encrypted key from the hardware before you could start trying to brute force the password. I'm sure it's possible, but it's also probably beyond the resources of most law enforcement organizations.
Not invalidating anything you said, but noting how it's even more difficult than it first seems:
* You only have 48 from the last time the phone was unlocked to use a fingerprint to unlock the device.
* After about six failed attempts, the phone is disable for 1 minute. Every couple of failed attempts after that exponentially increment the time disabled.
* You can set your phone to self-destruct (wipe itself) after 10 failed attempts.
Made in USA = backdoored, Snowden showed us that.
Lucky they're made in China then!
does the stuff on my cell phone seem like it should be protected by the 5th? Much of the data on my cell phone is data I wouldn't want created in the first place, and odds are it's damning enough to land me in prison regardless of whether I did the crime I'm being investigated for or not. If that unintentional byproduct of device usage is going to incriminate me, then how can I invoke the privilege? I feel like if there is a judicial body investigating me, there are places where I can invoke the 5th and draw the line, and my cell phone is one of those. These things are becoming part of us. I say, encrypt the shit out of them automatically. All of them.
I'll have to call you a troll. I have an iPhone 4S since 2011 and it runs iOS9 just fine. Sure, there is some lag here and there and the screen is cramped, but I'm much better off with iOS9 than I was with iOS7. I actually gained in battery life.
So, there's that.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Don’t have Trusted Hardware? Hmm? In what way don’t older iPhones have trusted hardware?
It is just that Apple doesn't have the tools in place to do it, and in fact may not know how to do it, and Apple is likely not pursuing the capability to do it. The court cannot compel Apple to do something that they do not know how to do.
Anything is possible.
So it's impossible for anything to be impossible?
No, but some "impossible" things may just be very very hard and take a long long time, and that also means it may take a long, long time to show that it definitely can't be done.
Apple should use the deep thought defence:
Judge: your task is to decrypt this phone
Apple: tricky
Judge: but can you do it?
Apple: yes, but it may take a while
Judge: how long?
Apple: approximately seven and a half million years
Now find an expert witness to prove Apple is wrong...
Yeah, because an operating system for a computer platform where performance doesn't double every year, and networking standards don't change every 3 years (desktops / laptops) is exactly the same as an operating system for a platform where they do (mobile telephones)
How long has Microsoft continued to support Windows Phone 7? Oh, right until Windows Phone 8 came out. And how many of those WP7 devices got upgrades to WP8? Not very many, if any at all.
So even with your Microsoft example, it's a double standard.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
You missed out the best bit:
"Seven and a half..."
"What, not til next week?"
"...million years."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
I've heard rumors that his cancer was government-caused (like Jack Ruby's). In Steve's case, it was because he wasn't playing ball with the spying agencies. This is saddening, but it's good to see Apple standing up for The People.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Possibly.
Long story short, PIN codes and such aren't long enough to be cryptologically secure so if you can copy the state you can brute force it easily. So what happens is you have a trusted chip that takes a PIN on one end, returns the AES key to decrypt on the other end. This chip has a countdown so if you enter the wrong PIN too many times, it'll wipe the key. It's also tamper-proof so if you try to open up the chip and alter the countdown or read the key directly it'll self-destruct. Essentially Apple is using the same kind of chip as "Trusted Computing"/"Secure Boot" uses to protect the private keys, nobody is supposed to be able to be extract them. Not me, not you, not Apple, not the courts, not the NSA. Or so we hope. What I guess this means is that older models don't have have that kind of purpose-designed hardware. If Apple wants, they can manage to read the PIN-encrypted key, which can then be brute forced, which can then be used to decrypt the rest of the device. There's not really any fix for that unless you have hardware support. Or you really want to type in >128 bits of entropy each time you unlock your phone.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The iPhones that have a thumbprint scanner have a "Secure Enclave". This hardware is used in conjunction with the software to make it impossible to unlock the device without the passcode.
Kiteboarding Gear Mention slashdot and get 10% off!
Long story short, PIN codes and such aren't long enough to be cryptologically secure so if you can copy the state you can brute force it easily. So what happens is you have a trusted chip that takes a PIN on one end, returns the AES key to decrypt on the other end. This chip has a countdown so if you enter the wrong PIN too many times, it'll wipe the key. It's also tamper-proof so if you try to open up the chip and alter the countdown or read the key directly it'll self-destruct. Essentially Apple is using the same kind of chip as "Trusted Computing"/"Secure Boot" uses to protect the private keys, nobody is supposed to be able to be extract them.
It's not quite that good. Secure Enclave isn't a separate chip, and it's not tamper-reactive. Secure Enclave is Apple's application of ARM's TrustZone, which provides a secure virtual CPU. Everything runs on the main CPU, but in a mode that provides access to all of the hardware, while the normal OS is restricted in what it can access. For example, pages of memory can be marked secure, in which case the MMU will not allow the normal (non-secure) OS to access them.
Done right, TrustZone is invulnerable to software-based attacks and can be somewhat resistant to hardware-based attacks.
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The fingerprint is only good once the phone has been previously unlocked via the passcode. After the phone is either rebooted, or if it's been greater than 48 hours since last unlocked, then then phone can no longer be unlocked via the fingerprint.
My guess is that there is a cache of the decryption key that is stored in RAM. a power cycle will clear that, or the phone clears it itself after 48 hours.
MS Supports its OS' for 15 YEARS, XP EOL was JUST last year. An "ancient" 2nd or third gen iPhone is what? 4 or 5 years old? False equivalence much?
As for android's support. Yep it's just as stupid as Apples, but in Androids defence they have seen major changes to the entire kernel source from dozens of vendors and 100s of contributors. Apple has only Apple using the same Kernel base, from the same developers, with the same hardware components.
The key here is "somewhat". I specifically recall an article about a guy using an electron microscope to retrieve information like this. It would be extremely hard to do for average people though, and Apple is well within its rights to tell the Judge that if he wants this information, he can pony up the several million dollars it would take to extract the key.
Or talk to the NSA, if it were a national security matter.
or cut off the finger...
Root what? Are you basing your view of an entire ecosystem on a single device from a single vendor? From what I've seen there hasn't been a single phone by Samsung, HTC, or from the official Nexus line that didn't have a root exploit (and in the case of some Nexus devices a written guide in Android's official docs of how to root).
Save for a few carrier specific variants, but that is only something that happens in the USA.
I specifically recall an article about a guy using an electron microscope to retrieve information like this.
Electron force microscopy is one way, but there are others, some that are much cheaper and more accessible. I may be giving a Black Hat talk next year about one of them, so I won't say any more for the moment :)
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tell the Judge that if he wants this information, he can pony up the several million dollars it would take to extract the key.
Sorry, should have responded to this as well. Even if you do the EFM attack, it won't cost several million dollars. You can rent the time required on the necessary equipment for a few thousand dollars, at most. Many grad students could get it for free.
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Anyone else notice that the second story beneath "Apple Tells US Judge It's 'Impossible' To Break Through Locks On New iPhones" is "Self-Encrypting Western Digital Hard Drives Easy To Crack"? (No relationship, just amused)
A few points.
People have extracted key from "secure processors" via hardware probes, but it is very difficult especially on the newest-gen lithography
And the apple model provides more guarantees than that. It layers a pin-derived key and a generated on-chip key at different levels of the file system.
The Secure Boot protocol does not guarantee secure key storage and does not require a specialized chip to implement. It's strongly recommended you rely on hardware mechanisms to verify the firmware, but such mechanisms are distinct feature and the nature of secure boot is that it can't actually verify the firmware on its own. Apple's security coprocessor is similar to a TPM but uses it's own unique API's.
Thank you for making this point more concisely than I've done in the past. I never actually looked as far back as the iPhone 4, so I'll remember that data point for future reference.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
I'm not sure how Apple hardware works but live finger detection (either from molds or cut off fingers) is a feature built in most mid and high end scanners. It's not really that hard to do anymore (albeit a problem in the past).
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
sounds like Oracle's ridiculous "unbreakable" statement. They may not currently know of a way around it, but I am willing to bet it isn't impossible and someone will discover a weakness, they always do.
Well, numbers don't matter in the end because most of this is just a matter of perception. You can show me that Booting is much slower on iOS9 than iOS8, but I so rarely boot my phone that I don't care. Apps start much faster. The keyboard pops out slightly slower. There are differences and if you want to only measure the things that are slower, you'll have cold hard numbers and still a flawed comparison. So measuring things is only part of the experience.
If iOS8 was almost unusable on your iPhone 4S, then I'm sorry. I've lived with it for about a year and found it fine. It was sure not as snappy as iOS7, but it brought some cool things and I found the deal acceptable.
As far as battery life is concerned, I can go full-day without recharging now which was not the case with iOS8. True, some of it is due to the fact that whan I reach 20% of battery, the iPhone switch to "energy saving" mode (or something like that) which did not exist in iOS8. It may be artificial, but it works. And it works well.
So, as I stated, and this is a subjective opinion, if I could switch back to iOS8 ot iOS7, I wouldn't. I'd keep iOS9. The rest is irrelevant.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
While the previous models did not have something called the “Secure Enclave” they’ve has dedicated security hardware/features/encryption since the iPhone 3GS.
So Apple are saying they can't hack your phone. But they'll still let you install apps that give your data away for free hmmmmm
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
For phones that PIN numbers specifically, an easier method I've used is programming an Arduino to act as a keyboard. No need to desolder chips or anything. Plug the Arduino mini into the USB, Android sees it as an external keyboard. A very simple Arduino program can be used to try four or five PINs, then wait a few seconds and loop. It'll get the PIN overnight or sooner. Again, I've done this one.
Screen unlock patterns are often visible as long smudges on the screen if you angle the screen in different ways relative to the light. You'll see lots of small smudges and one big smudge that goes across the screen with a couple of turns. The big one is the unlock pattern.
If the password is weak enough that you can search the space just by entering values, then there's really not much that can be done at present. My "dump the flash" approach is for when that can't work because the space is too large for it to be practical and you need something faster. Prior to Lollipop you could simply obtain the crypto footer then fire up a whole bunch of machines to search the password space in parallel.
The new TEE-based Gatekeepr password authentication app (introduced in M) offers a better way. It implements exponentially-increasing delays between allowed password attempts. I think the slope is too gentle, but it's steep enough that you're unlikely to get more than a couple hundred attempts, and that will take you months. Unfortunately it's not used to protect disk encryption in M (long story).
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Also, much of the security is from specially designed hardware. I don't know how far back that hardware goes.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Good luck with that. I've owned my current iPhone for two years now, and I've gotten that fingerprint lock to work exactly three times.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
There are propositions in any mathematical system sophisticated enough to use integer arithmetic and first-order predicate logic that are impossible to prove.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So anyone who bought an iphone 4 in mid-late 2013 had support for their phone dropped within a few months of buying it.
Yet, they paid a fraction of what one cost new. This is why.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
The key here is "somewhat". I specifically recall an article about a guy using an electron microscope to retrieve information like this. It would be extremely hard to do for average people though, and Apple is well within its rights to tell the Judge that if he wants this information, he can pony up the several million dollars it would take to extract the key.
Or talk to the NSA, if it were a national security matter.
Done correctly even if a million dollars was on the table extraction of data would be unlikely.
Judges like the audience of CSI fail to grasp how difficult these requests are.
Most importantly they fail to grock that some points of attack are being assaulted
by bot-farms/botnet on the internet. Some of these collections of machines under the control
of "bad" guys represent millions of machines (hundreds of millions of $$). The size of these
botnets averages closer to 20,000 machines but that is a command and control thing. Still at $200
per machine 20,000 = $4,000,000. Most interesting machines a closer to $1000 so $20million bucks
of networked hardware.
i.e The threat model that Apple, Microsoft and others are attempting to address is very real,
very big and demands some of the strongest technology to address. This issue is global
and larger than the single case in front of this judge. Not just national and corporate security but the
security of all nations and corporations.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Yet, they paid a fraction of what one cost new. This is why.
They still paid a lot.
I can give actual pricing from 2013.
But today the iphone 6S is the new hotness. You can still buy a new iphone 5c which is 3 generations back. And an 8GB 5c costs $480 at one of the local carriers. Anyone buying one is still perfectly reasonable if they expected to get security updates for a couple years from today.
Does the Nexus 6 I've had practically since it was released count? It's had hardware encryption since support for the 805's coprocessor was added in 5.1.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.