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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.
Unless you use the fingerprint lock... which courts have ruled isn't protected by the 5th.
Yes sure, you can enroll an iOS device in MDM and then send it an unlock command. The end-user has to agree and approve this first of all of course.
Apple have built the system so that it is immune to a direct unlock. Apple and Microsoft have been giving clear signals that they no longer want to be stuck in the middle of international legal / court disputes requiring them to unlock under court order. So they've re-engineered their encryption and unlock protocols so that they no longer hold any master keys / unlocks etc. This also makes these devices useless when stolen.
The only slightly questionable part is wether they can access any cloud backups. Although that might not be what the court asked.
Jason.
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.
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.
> 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)
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 *
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.
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.
That only helps if apps can unlock the device. They can't on Android, and I see no reason why they'd be able to on iOS, either.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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
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.
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.
Made in USA = backdoored, Snowden showed us that.
Lucky they're made in China then!
Don’t have Trusted Hardware? Hmm? In what way don’t older iPhones have trusted hardware?
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.
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
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.