Godfather Of Encryption Explains Why Apple Should Help The FBI (bgr.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Famed cryptographer and Turing Award winner, Adi Shamir, has an interesting if not surprising take on Apple's current legal tussle with the FBI. While speaking on a panel at RSA Conference 2016 earlier this week, the man who helped co-invent the vaunted RSA algorithm (he's the 'S' in RSA) explained why he sides with the FBI as it pertains to the San Bernardino shooter's locked iPhone. It has nothing to do with placing trapdoors on millions of phones around the world," Shamir explained. "This is a case where it's clear those people are guilty. They are dead; their constitutional rights are not involved. This is a major crime where 14 people were killed. The phone is intact. All of this aligns in favor of the FBI." Shamir continued, "even though Apple has helped in countless cases, they decided not to comply this time. My advice is that they comply this time and wait for a better test case to fight where the case is not so clearly in favor of the FBI."

Comments

Adi "IANAL" Shamir

[nimbius]

Adi:
no one has argued the case isnt firmly in the hands of the FBI, or that they arent entitled to prosecute it. What we're highlighting and opposing is the biblical retribution with which the government seems intent upon pursuing this cases. the entire purpose of unlocking the phone at this opportune time is to create a precedent so that, in future endeavours and cases there is no point at which "favour" is ever questioned. the purpose of forcing apple to unlock this phone, or any device for that matter, is to create a legal standing by which any other device the government sees fit can be unlocked for any reason, however remote.

the facts stand: both killers are dead. their motives were known. their accomplices were known. their method is known. this is more than enough to convict a corpse.

Re:wasnt RSA paid to backdoor by nsa?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes:

http://www.cnet.com/news/security-firm-rsa-took-millions-from-nsa-report/

Re:What a bunch of ignorance

[hawguy]

Why does everyone think Apple has to create anything new? They already have the ability to do what the FBI wants. It's not a backdoor, it's not something they have to use on every phone...it's a simple code adjustment to turn off the poison pill and can easily be pushed to this one single phone. In fact, it can be built specifically for this one phone and it will only work on the one phone. Due to the way Apple already does their updates, they do this already as it is. They don't do mass updates to apps and iOS to all phones. each phone is unique and has it's own nonce. that's all Apple needs to match this code up to.

This isn't a technical issue. It's about people's opinion's on whether these douchebags have rights still and whether this actually violates them.
***Spoiler Alert*** They don't.

You don't seem to understand how slippery slopes work.

It's not "just one phone", and never was, it started at one and only one phone, because you know, terrorism, we need to read the phone of just this one terrorist and Apple won't help us! Then "Well there may be a dozen others that we'd like to break into". Then "Law enforcement agencies possess hundreds, or even thousands of phones they'd like to break into". And somewhere between "dozens" and "thousands", it becomes too unwieldy for the government to wait for Apple to unlock each one, so they'll require the tools to do it on their own.

And once they've proven that they can force Apple to create software at their bidding, they'll easily be able to force Apple to hand over the tools they need to decrypt phones at will. And really, there's no end to what they can force Apple to hack into their phones.

Re:has nobody thought

[AchilleTalon]

Obviously you haven't follow that case very carefully. The iPhone isn't locked using fingerprints, it uses a 4 digit password. And before you ask why they just don't try all the combination, after 10 trials the iPhone may have been setup to delete the data. In addition, there is a delay between each trial which render this method unpractical unless you remove the delay and the 10 trials limit, which is exactly what the FBI is asking Apple to do for this iPhone by flashing a new firmware on it remotely. Yes, this model doesn't require the user to authorize the firmware to be flashed. So, that is totally possible to do. And why do they ask Apple and aren't just do it themselves? Because the firmware must be signed with Apple's private key otherwise the security chip in the iPhone will block the firmware execution.

Re: What a crock

[BlueStrat]

The fbi is willing to let APL control everything in this particular case:

Wrong.

Look up the actual court order.

The text of the court order instructs APL to place the tool on a hard drive and give it to the FBI to use.

Are you stupid or are you a shill?

Of course the two are not mutually exclusive, and as often as not, correlate strongly. Particularly when the shills work for government.

Strat