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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.
Have you even read the summary? How would the iPhone do that if they make binary image of the storage? Can it magically format other storage devices as well?
It all depends on password strength. If it is based on a PIN number (4 digits), then it is of course very very easy to brute force decryption. If it is based on finger print, it is even easier: a finger print is 1 digit only! /ducks
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.
and watch the phone format itself after they fail.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the answer from a 6 digit Slashdot member. It manages an almost perfect balance between trollish and imbecilic, while leaving no doubt about the fact he didn't RTFA.
At 5 digits, his reply would be a dupe of a previous one, and you'd understand he doesn't even understand the concept of the article.
At 4, the comment would just be an anagram of both "first post" and a bodily fluid.
Reading a 3 digits comment would be akin to hearing the voice of God.
At 2 digits, the words shape the chaos into reality.
Not even Gods speak about single digit comments. And when they do it's in weakly whispers. For such power is better to leave asleep.
No, not on the iPhone 5C it isn't.
The 'Secure Enclave' is 5S, 6, 6+, 6S, and 6S+.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
He called it a hard-drive, not a hard-disk. Honestly, we're splitting hairs about shit literally no one that does not frequent technology blogs gives a crap about. This is especially true because the HDD/SSD distinction has no bearing on the merits of his suggestion.
7-digit ID talking shit about 6-digit IDs. Now I've seen it all.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
This is incorrect. The phone does not store the key anywhere. The key is made up of the phones unique identifier value, and your pin, combined to make the key. What they can do is use acid, high powered visual equipment and lasers to try to determine the unique identifier from the iPhones CPU, and then try to brute force that with various pin numbers.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
The iPhone's flash drive is encrypted. The key is securely stored. If you guess the lock code incorrectly 10 times then it's not the hard drive that's erased, it's the key that is irrevocably destroyed. At that point it doesn't matter if you have a bunch of copies of the disk, you have a bunch of garbage and the only key in the universe was just wiped out.
The answer is easy. They are not interested in the contents of the terrorist's phone as much as they want a magic key that will unlock anyone's iPhone anywhere. The NSA already has all the metadata from this phone recorded anyway, so the whole alarmist search for the phone's contents is a front for the government's overweening desire to pry into everyone's life.
Low UIDs aren't that uncommon. There are 899 three digit UIDs. That would be a pantheon dwarfing even the Greek gods of old.
I read the internet for the articles.
What I fundamentally don't understand is this:
EITHER
a) if this is GENUINELY a mattter of national security, the FBI could actually hand the phone to the NSA and get the information in about 30 seconds but for some reason isn't doing so, or
b) the NSA's upteen-gajillion-dollar "black" budget has pretty much enabled them to record/analyze/store only the utterly banal unencrypted conversations that you could hear just sitting and listening to the guy next to you at the coffeeshop, ie almost entirely wasted on stupid crap.
I don't see really any other alternative.
I'd expect, for example, that Russian and Chinese government communications are ROUTINELY of a higher level of encryption than the bloody iPhone you can buy at the mall, and yet the NSA's *job* is to listen in on that stuff and they claim that they're pretty damned good at it?
-Styopa
Let there be...
nevermind.