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FBI Should Try To Unlock iPhone Without Apple's Help, Lawmaker Says (csoonline.com)
itwbennett writes: Representative Darrell Issa, a California Republican and former car-alarm entrepreneur, has suggested that the FBI try unlocking mass shooter Syed Rizwan Farook by copying the hard drive and running password attempts until they find the correct password. Bruce Sewell, Apple's senior vice president and general counsel, said during a congressional hearing that, although the company doesn't know the condition of the shooter's iPhone, Issa's approach may work.
Well duh the approach may work, which is one of the reasons the All Writs Act shouldn't apply (it is only supposed to be used when Apple's help is necessary, not 'necessary for how we feel like doing it'). But the goal of the FBI is not, and has never been, to actually get into the phone. The FBI's goal all along has been to use this as ammunition to press Congress for mandated backdoors and/or more funding for their 'cybercrime' division.
You can bet your ass the NSA already HAS a copy and is either actively brute forcing it, or has already done so. But they'll never publicly admit to it, because doing so will expose too much of their capability.
Also, in terms of the Cloud Backup approach, it should be a relatively simple matter to hook the phone up to a custom network which mimicks the iCloud server, and they would know immediately if the phone is even trying to backup to it or not. If it is, it's also relatively simple for the Cloud instance to just accept whatever password hash the phone sends.
That isn't the problem, but the real problem is that the private key is kept in NAND memory, not the flash memory (what they're calling the "hard drive"). The FBI isn't already doing this because it's really hard... mathematically hard. As in, unless they have quantum computers we don't know about, they won't be able to figure out what's on that phone for eons. And without the private key, it would be hard to even know the difference between the encrypted gobbledygook and the unencrypted data if you crack it.
I maintain that they are pretty sure that there's nothing of value on that phone, and that this whole exercise was a ruse to gain government backdoors to encryption because, terrorism.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Well, the trick (as I understand it) is that the phone uses the CPU's internal UID as part of the AES-256 key, ensuring that all cracking attempts must be done on that phone. There's no way to read the UID out of the CPU without extreme measures.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
it's a forum full of geeks.
A forum full of geeks knows it's not that hard to break into an iPhone and this is nothing but a political maneuver.
I've stated before John McAffee is calling out the obviousness of the situation, but just like all the other political stuff that creeps across the site the modern Slashdot feels the need to prop up the political agenda despite the obvious answers staring us right in the face.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
...that the NSA or some other US intelligence agency cannot/has not cracked this phone. What I find more believable is that they have the information and they want to force Apple to crack the phone to protect their methods and knowledge of their access. If they win the get the bonus of sticking it to Apple and get a precedent they can use in other cases.