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McAfee Says He Lied About iPhone Hacking Method To Get Public Attention
blottsie writes: McAfee, who founded of one of the first companies to offer antivirus software, claimed on CNN and Russia Today, as well as in a Business Insider column, that he could bypass the advanced encryption protecting the phone without Apple's help. But he lied in these interviews, he said in an interview with the Daily Dot, to "get a shitload of public attention."
Obviously. Move along.
Can't understand why he's not as popular as Trump, Sanders, or Clinton. He's doing the same things they are!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
He is trying to get attention by being honest? That's brand new it seems.
I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on McAfee lied here!
And so he really can crack the iPhone's security.
Mc-Afee not MAC-A-fee
The big difference between him and most politicians is that he's willing to admit when he's lying. Someone like a Trump or a Clinton would just say that they were just being "misunderstood", or that the media "took them out of context".
He is trying to get attention by being honest? That's brand new it seems.
He is being honest about being dishonest!? Is that a redeeming attribute? - confused-
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
he's trying to bring attention to the issue, that the FBI is trying to fool everyone into thinking they cannot crack an iphone.
“That video, on my YouTube account, it has 700,000 views. My point is to bring to the American public the problem that the FBI is trying to [fool] the American public. How am I going to do that, by just going off and saying it? No one is going to listen to that crap.
“So I come up with something sensational,” he continued. “Now, what I did not lie about was my ability to crack the iPhone." ...
Later in the interview, McAfee described his method, which involves “decapping” the phone’s processor and acquiring the device’s unique identifier (UID), that may allow someone to brute force the phone’s password
he's not wrong either. a grad student explained this in a blog post from October 2014.
Why Apple's iPhone encryption won't stop NSA (or any other intelligence agency)
excerpt from the post:
If Apple did their job properly, however, the UID (device encryption key) is completely inaccessible to software and is locked up in some kind of on-die hardware security module (HSM). This means that even if Eve is able to execute arbitrary code on the device while it is locked, she must bruteforce the passcode on the device itself - a very slow and time-consuming process.
In this case, an attacker may still be able to execute an invasive physical attack. By depackaging the SoC, etching or polishing down to the polysilicon layer, and looking at the surface of the die with an electron microscope the fuse bits can be located and read directly off the surface of the silicon.
Since the key is physically burned into the IC, once power is removed from the phone there's no practical way for any kind of self-destruct to erase it. Although this would require a reasonably well-equipped attacker, I'm pretty confident based on my previous experience that I could do it myself, with equipment available to me at school, if I had a couple of phones to destructively analyze and a few tens of thousands of dollars to spend on lab time. This is pocket change for an intelligence agency.
Once the UID is extracted, and the encrypted disk contents dumped from the flash chips, an offline bruteforce using GPUs, FPGAs, or ASICs could be used to recover the key in a fairly short time.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Therefore, a change to iOS is capable of altering the 10-strikes rule on their devices, and that's what the FBI is asking Apple to do.
Yes. Except one thing.
Loading a recovery image requires putting the device in *Recovery Mode*, and that's a hardware DFU mode whereby you talk to a small piece of firmware whose only job is to overwrite the Flash contents.
It doesn't load shit into RAM and run it in order to overwrite the flash contents while preserving data: it's a *RECOVERY* mode, not an *UPDATE* mode. It's what you do as a last resort, assuming you backed your crap up to the iCloud, because if you didn't, that shit is *gone*.
To do an *UPDATE* without overwriting the user data portion of the flash contents, you talk to the *ptpd*, which implements the DFU protocol at a higher level, in user space. How do you do that? Well, first, you have to make the ptpd willing to talk to you (or iTunes). How you you do that?
You UNLOCK the frigging phone.
So to load the image that the FBI wants Apple to write for them, and then to load, you'd have to unlock the phone to enable you to unlock the phone.
Cluebat here. Knock knock knock... is that you, head? Yeah, there's two DFU implementations in the iPhone. What? You didn't know that? Well now you do. Yeah. Yeah. We can write the image you want us to write, and then we can load it onto the iPhone, but to do that, it will wipe out the very data you seek. What? No, we can't make monkeys fly out our ass... I think you are confusing us with Jim Carrey in that movie "Bruce Almighty".
People really do not understand technology... especially technology designed to prevent exactly the type of thing the FBI wants done.