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FBI Director Suggests iPhone Hacking Method May Remain Secret (reuters.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: FBI Director James Comey said on Tuesday that his agency was still assessing whether a vulnerability used to unlock an iPhone linked to one of the San Bernardino killers would go through a government review to determine if it should be disclosed to Apple or the public. "We are in the midst of trying to sort that out," Comey said. "The threshold (for disclosure) is, are we aware of the vulnerability, or did we just buy a tool and don't have sufficient knowledge of the vulnerability to implicate the process?" The White House has a procedure for reviewing technology security flaws and deciding which ones should be made public. Although officials say the process leans toward disclosure, it is not set up to handle or reveal flaws that are discovered and owned by private companies, sources have told Reuters, raising questions about the effectiveness of the so-called Vulnerabilities Equities Process.
Does anyone actually believe anything they say on the matter anymore? I'm still not convinced they even have the contents of the phone at the point.
Government: "This is not the iPhone hack you are looking for... move along."
Citizen: "You are right, I am going to go home and rethink my life."
Besides I'm sure China, Russia, North Korea and Co. already know how it was done. Just ask them!
Soo, they didn't actually crack the thing at all.
Let's see: no actionable data from the phone (imagine the headline: "FBI's cracked iPhone thwarts terror plot"), they haven't shared this skeleton key with Law Enforcement, and now they might just never divulge the secret at all??
"Ignore the man behind the curtain."
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Because its a policy / precedent.
How they behave with this security vulnerability today is how they will behave with the next one tomorrow.
It's literally a ... "first they came for the X, but I was not a X, so I did nothing" situation.
And theirs is the wrong action, law enforcement should disclose vulnerabilities to the manufacturer and owners so that they can be corrected in future, not so that they can exploit them themselves.
Its fundamentally the exact opposite of what they should be doing, FBI & NSA both, and the government in general. Their function is to 'serve and protect' the public. I am in no way being served by there being known security vulnerabilities in the products I use. If the government knows them, then so do other actors. I don't trust those other actors, and based on government behavior I don't trust them either.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Yeah. Like that's ACTUALLY going to happen.
They can't keep anything ELSE secret, but this'll remain an undisclosed security hole until the end of time...
Hey! Do they have any bridges to sell us too?
Bargain priced ocean-front property in Nevada?
Are they all secretly Nigerian princes looking to enrich us if we can just help them a little?
Call me when these assclowns descend back to reality.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I've heard of extrapolating a process, or even inferring something unknown from known facts (sure, that could be a process). Heck, even "explicate" would work...but "implicate the process"?
Implicate it in what? Manslaughter? Conspiracy to defraud?
"I love animals! Some are cute, others are tasty, what's not to like?" - Betsy Schroeder, Jeopardy contestant
As do several organized crime outfits in Eastern Europe.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
They didn't use a third party to hack the phone. They had the ability the entire time and invented this narrative when they realized that they weren't going to get the court precedent that they wanted.
"still assessing whether a vulnerability... would go through a government review to determine if it should be disclosed"
They're debating over if they should debate over disclosing this. Yes, I get the reason why, but it still sounds moronic.
"Oh no... he found the
I don't see law enforcement going around warning people about bump keys.
Everybody knows they exist, and lots of information exists and info is readily available about them. You can buy locks if you like that defend against them.
If law enforcement found a bump key, and then kept it for themselves, and then used it on suspects, and refused to show it to anybody... well that hasn't actually happened...
Anyone who think law enforcement = security guards is literally retarded.
What precisely do you think they are? Crime prevention, and crime investigation are their two main functions.
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So you've effectively put yourself at war with the American people in that statement, do you realize that?
You've weaponized an asset of an American company and are intentionally putting the American public at risk to further your own agenda.
You should be hung from the highest bridge with care.
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How they behave with this security vulnerability today is how they will behave with the next one tomorrow.
Requirement should be to prosecute someone in court, they have to disseminate all technical details to the public of how they gained access to the phone --- no black boxing, closed, secret, or proprietary technologies or programs allowed.
No full disclosure of the design specs and source code of any exploit software or exploit devices, then no evidence from hacked phone can be used in court.
"...is not set up to handle or reveal flaws that are discovered and owned by private companies..."
It's OWNED by Apple. It's their software, copyright and all. (Maybe even a few patents in there.)
Any flaw that's in it was created by Apple, even if unintentionally, and is still part of their software which they 'own'.
Just because some guy in a trenchcoat sold you a map to the back door of the theater along with a copy of the key to unlock it, doesn't mean he owns the friggin door!
So, since there wasn't any useful data on the phone and they aren't actually prosecuting anyone, they should be allowed to keep it a secret?
I'll bite... what's the association?
The FBI is called any time a local law enforcement team is unable to handle their own processes. Consider it to be something like a two tier support system. Cops first, Feds next.
When it comes to technology related issues, the FBI very likely is contacted for use of their forensics labs almost constantly. As telephones become more difficult for law enforcement to crack, the FBI will be contacted more often, establish a longer backlog and especially in the case of police departments with less funding, will have to perform work with little or no recompense.
When a terrorist's telephone became available to push the issue with, the FBI saw this as an opportunity to simplify the process of unlocking telephones more rapidly since Apple would of course be reasonable and finally see that law enforcement needs more effective ways of accessing such data without the FBI always needing to be called. If nothing else, they should be able to disable the 10 failure bomb and manually type 10000 or 1000000 values in by hand.
Apple didn't play with this game. If they were to publish a method to the FBI to make the phones vulnerable, all it would take is some cop showing off for his nephew to leak the information into the public and it would quickly become widespread.
Whatever the underlying issues with the case is, law enforcement at times requires access to data on telephones. But this issue is much wider spread than just America. As such, Apple is trying to have some control over the unlocking of the phones, not because they want to screw the FBI (which these days they might want to) but because they don't want to be responsible for supporting less ethical governments.
Both sides have valid points and valid concerns.
If Apple manages to make an iPhone which can't be easily hack (hasn't happened yet) then the problem will be somewhat solved by removing the possibility of unlocking the phone to begin with.
He's supposedly in charge. He could end all this with a phone call. He is the one that bears the blame.
My thought: Security cam shoulder surfing. What if the "crack" actually involved checking security footage from any banks, stores, etc. visited by the terrorist before the incident. One of them might've had a clear enough angle to see him punch in the code.
It's just dumb enough to actually work, but something the FBI might not want to admit out loud. Not only for fear of sounding stupid, but this would also back up Apple's stance that the phones themselves are secure... and the FBI doesn't want that. Nor does the FBI want people to realize just how much they're on camera.
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I read that as "FBI Director James Cagney"...
Only because they have more specialized picks and skills needed to deal with them. Circular locks aren't inherently harder to pick, merely less common that a locksmith or someone nefearious will have the tools to do so, or have practiced on them since they aren't commonly used.
Security seems more to be about "Hey, it's easier to go over there and break into THAT, don't bother with THIS."
If law enforcement found a bump key, and then kept it for themselves, and then used it on suspects, and refused to show it to anybody... well that hasn't actually happened...
Close enough... you can open any typical lock with a pick gun, the cops have them, and it's illegal for you to have them but anyone can totally get one. What's the difference?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Probably one of the best are those circular locks like on most vending machines.
Oh yeah, that looks amazingly secure.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The best guess I've heard is that the FBI hired an Israeli security firm.The Israelis have strong reasons to want to hack personal phones, which are used both for terrorist communications and for control devices for emote detonators.
The level of random ideas on the topic is indicative that there is actually something seriously wrong with the discourse on here. People are making way way to many random accusations that they appear 100% confident on. While I realize this is /. Nut this is a much grander and more fetishized version of this behavioral pattern.
I think most investigations stay secret. The police are not required to disclose the details of specific investigations, unless someone winds up in court charged with a crime.
Why would you expect them to disclose the secret with no net benefit to the public in doing so, After the gov't Paid for this vulnerability, and the value derived from this payment will be completely destroyed if Apple learns the details of it?
Well that isn't a problem in this case, they won't be taking a deceased perpetrator to court anyway.
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As reading the iOS Security Paper has proven too difficult for you, here's an excellent iOS Encryption Primer that discusses how iOS encryption actually works.
Which is probably what's going to happen. I mean there's only so many times you can do it before some lawyer wises up and will try for "tampered evidence" defense.
At which point the phone will come up and the FBI will have to describe how they cracked the phone. If it ends up with a third party they'd get at those details to make sure there was no chain of custody issues and that the methods used were kosher and won't tamper with evidence.
At which point the method of cracking WILL be public.
Otherwise it might be argued the evidence was tampered with, or chain of custody lost, and thus any subsequent warrants issued with that information were no longer valid and associated evidence.
Heck, a judge found a defendant not guilty despite evidence to the contrary - it's just the evidence was obtained using a Stingray without a valid warrant (there was a warrant issued, but the judge felt it was issued improperly and thus invalid - making the evidence collected without a warrant) and the judge threw out that illegally obtained evidence. The judge certainly *felt* the defendant was guilty, but could not rule that way because there was insufficient leftover evidence.
If any evidence was obtained from cracking a phone that lead to additional searches, tossing the phone's evidence will suddenly mean those warrants were invalid and that evidence gathered is not allowed as well.
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If you are willing to do that, you would probably just take a crowbar to the vending machine. That lock wasn't picked, it was destroyed. And it wasn't particularly discreet, quick, or quiet.
Really the only use for it would be as in the video where you wanted to open the vending machine without the keys while doing minimal damage to it... which would only be a concern if you owned it.
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I've already wrecked you in another thread so there's little point going over it all again here. You simply don't understand what you're reading Rosyna. The hardware UID isn't as magical as you think it is. All it does is force you to run brute force attacks on the actual hardware, instead of outside it. The weak pin code becomes a major problem due to a 4 digit pin having a mere 10,000 combinations. This is precisely why the firmware on the chip tries to limit the attempts, and frequency of attempts, and precisely why the FBI wants custom firmware, or security exploits, to remove these limitations.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
You haven't "wrecked" anything. All you've done is proven your unwillingness to learn.
At least you're finally acknowledging it's no where near as simple as brute forcing a 4 digit PIN, as your previous posts claimed repeatedly.
Now you've realized/learned there are other major, significant hurdles to doing a brute force attack, such as finding security holes in other parts of iOS that first allow you to run arbitrary code on the iOS device when you have physical access or getting access to the UID by physically decapping the SoC.
So I assume this means you've stopped claiming it's as simple as reading the NAND directly.
Actually its probably as simple as, not reading the nand, but overwriting it, at least in the 5c implementation. The 5c does not have secure enclave which means the hardware encryption is done on the main soc, and the brute force security checks are likely part of iOS, instead of the secure enclave firmware. This means you could likely image the nand and solder in and out fresh copies to reset the failed attempts counter. This is a theory (not mine, but many others) and the logic is sound.
if you would like to learn anything else by acting knowledgeable and getting schooled I'll be here for a couple more hours.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Go ahead. Release the information.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
What? Isn't that what you keep telling us?
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
iOS has an anti-replay counter to prevent reimaging like the type you suggest to assist with a brute force attack. Furthermore, the "secure enclave" is a marketing term Apple uses to group disparate security features under one umbrella. Most of the security features under the "secure enclave" umbrella still existed on previous iOS devices.
Finally, the Apple A6 SoC does have its own rewritable NVRAM that can be used to store the number of incorrect attempts without needing to store it on the NAND.