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How The FBI Might've Opened the San Bernardino Shooter's iPhone 5c (schneier.com)
"Remember the San Bernardino killer's iPhone, and how the FBI maintained that they couldn't get the encryption key without Apple providing them with a universal backdoor?" Slashdot reader LichtSpektren quotes Bruce Schneier:
Many of us computer-security experts said that they were wrong, and there were several possible techniques they could use. One of them was manually removing the flash chip from the phone, extracting the memory, and then running a brute-force attack without worrying about the phone deleting the key. The FBI said it was impossible. We all said they were wrong. Now, Sergei Skorobogatov has proved them wrong.
Sergei's new paper describes "a real world mirroring attack on the Apple iPhone 5c passcode retry counter under iOS 9." The process does not require any expensive and sophisticated equipment. All needed parts are low cost and were obtained from local electronics distributors. By using the described and successful hardware mirroring process it was possible to bypass the limit on passcode retry attempts... Although the process can be improved, it is still a successful proof-of-concept project.
Sergei's new paper describes "a real world mirroring attack on the Apple iPhone 5c passcode retry counter under iOS 9." The process does not require any expensive and sophisticated equipment. All needed parts are low cost and were obtained from local electronics distributors. By using the described and successful hardware mirroring process it was possible to bypass the limit on passcode retry attempts... Although the process can be improved, it is still a successful proof-of-concept project.
they knowed how
Why not let them get away with the crime?
Aren't our 1%ers above the law?
Stein is anti-war.
Is anyone REALLY surprised that the FBI was wrong? Government doesn't attract top-tier talent. Never has, never will. When your hiring practices, policies, procedures, compensation and benefits are all at the bottom of the barrel, well... that's what you get. The bottom of the barrel.
Some people here on Slashdot said it was impossible, but it turned out it was possible after all? How does that happen?
It's been common wisdom for years that with physical access to the device and unlimited time and resources, almost all encryption schemes can be defeated. In many cases this might simply mean using a mechanism to bypass the encryption rather than defeating it through brute force. But the fact is, regardless of what protections they have, devices have to ultimately present the data to the user unencrypted to actually use it. So there is usually always some kind of way in.
This attack is still done on device. It just clones the NAND back to "0 strikes" after each 6 attempts.
This attack doesn't extract the memory and doesn't decode externally. It just copies NANDs.
Why is this significant? Because it means you can't do extraction in parallel, you still have to go through all the codes sequentially on the device.
It defeats the significant portions of the backoff. It defeats the erase after n failures. It's a very significant attack.
But no one said this type of attack was impossible. I personally read about variants on this attack while the controversy was going on. I even posited it myself. I believe Apple even addressed it claiming that this attack wasn't possible on later iPhones due to a change in how the failure count is stored.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
You could easily automate reading a phone's flash chip. Just get a mounting connector (basically like a powered machine socket with one pin connecting to every pin on the flash chip, providing power, signals, memory and address busses (like an in-circuit chip tester). Leave the rest of the phone powered off. Read all the data off the chip to another computer, then apply "acres of processors" brute force hacking to the recovered data. No need to unsolder the chip (its dangerous, you could damage the chip or the phone). You could also steal the phone (as a 3 letter agency), copy all the data from the chip, re-assemble the phone, let the suspect "find" their phone and it will work as before, not knowing all the information has been read. If they think the phone is lost or has been compromised, they will change encryption and tell their handlers of the security breach. If their data is intact, they won't know any better and will continue to use the now compromised data channels, allowing a deeper network penetration.
In fact what Apple, Samsung, et al should be doing is putting a tamper switch inside the phone. Once the switch it is pulled, it disengages the RAM and NAND and if the device was set to "wipe" if fail, erase the NAND.
> are essentially unbreakable, even using quantum computers
The Enigma was "unbreakable", until it was broken.
DES was unbreakable, until it was broken.
MD5 was unbreakable, until it was broken.
RSA was "unbreakable" last year. Not so much this year.
There are some new algorithms which haven't quite been completely broken just yet. Well, unless the new algorithm is used by someone who -also- allows an older algorithm, im which case the service using the new algorithm is vulnerable to DROWN.
As someone who can barely see a 0603 SMD device, I find this quite impressive. He was able to remove the flash from the board, get it to function, watch it communicate, and identify the multiple mechanisms used by the chip to communicate and where on the flash it accessed. I always suspected the way the FBI did it was a brute force attack on copies of the chip data.
Neat!
DES was unbreakable, until it was broken.
MD5 was unbreakable, until it was broken.
RSA was "unbreakable" last year. Not so much this year.
DES was actually designed to be crackable.
MD5 is not an encryption algorithm.
RSA has not been considered robustly secure for a long time, and was never considered unbreakable.
If decryption takes 1e6 times as long as encryption, the algorithm is easily crackable. If it takes 1e12 times as long, it is good enough for casual communications. 1e15 is secure against all but the most determined government sponsored crackers. If the ratio is 1e100 it is uncrackable in the life of the universe (the number of quarks in the universe is ~ 1e80). That ratio has been growing exponentially, far faster than computing hardware has been improving.
Introduction to post-quantum cryptography -PCP
RSA was tampered with by the NSA to allow for it to be easily cracked. While we'd known there was tampering with it, the extent of that tampering wasn't known until the Snowden leaks. That said, the flaw is only with dual elliptic curve and I don't think anybody uses that anymore. Also the only thing cracked this year was RSA 220, which is 729 bits and the next you'd logically expect to see broken. My secure emails use RSA-1024 (I didn't set that up, all I do is check a checkbox that says "Secure" and the recipient needs to use their key card and PIN to decrypt it - not sure how it works for out of office emails).
Not a surprise that the US government uses RSA for secure emails but AES (designed in Belgium away from NSA tampering) for both military and confidential secret and top secret encoded data. Confidential data needs to be at least AES-128 encrypted and Secret/Top Secret AES-256 if I recall correctly. We're insulated from that stuff (our software backend handles it), all we need to know is the classification.
Of course they knew all along how to get into the phone, probably five different ways.
But all the public+media+dog had was speculation and unfortunately a big spotlight on the subject device.
Normally they work in secret and in the shadows and crack these phones all the time. But this one had everybody watching, and when everyone is watching, you do not get out your best-kept secrets and reveal them in front of the cameras. The agencies didn't want to confirm any of that by suddenly showing up with a cracked phone, thus revealing they had various techniques to do exactly what they wanted. So they tried the front door approach with Apple, and then some other approach where they can make some outside company look like the source and patsy.
Meanwhile all the much more secret techniques remain secret. Done.
But all the various bloggers and media people want to know exactly how it was done, which is exactly why they went to some effort to find a disposable way in rather than reveal their secrets. Meh. Who cares. Privacy is an illusion. If for a moment anyone thinks their iPhone is some kind of sacred secret place only they can access, well, they are fools. Nothing is secret.
Sig for hire.
This is exactly what everyone was saying at the time. The FBI didn't really give a damn about what was on the phone. All they wanted was the legal precedent for forcing companies to give up their security.
Correction: Stein says she is anti-war.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
You need to stop using the word "open" to refer to the act of unlocking a mobile device.
You don't "open" a smartphone.
There isn't a lid that you remove to gain access to it.
You unlock it.
http://blog.mdsec.co.uk/2015/0...
I tried to explain this to a number of people on other forums and got a surprising amount of pushback. Nice to have someone prove me right.
Is this a joke? hahahah "how the FBI opened the iPhone5c? Ohh how... after all, Apple does not help the Feds... AT ALL." Ok... CUT! Nice shot everyone... do you think they will believe it? How numb and dumb and fallen have we become... Brains, what I want you for?