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Russian Authorities Are Trying To Unlock iPhone 4S From Russian Ambassador's Killer (techcrunch.com)
The off-duty police officer who killed the Russian ambassador in Turkey was shot by Turkish special forces minutes after the crime. He had an iPhone 4S on him, and now, Haberturk, Turkish authorities asked for Russia's help to unlock the iPhone. From a report: Given that it's an iPhone 4S and it has a 4-digit passcode, it should be quite easy to unlock the device. There are many solutions out there to do this and authorities don't even need to ask for Apple's help. The iPhone 4S is quite old now and it was a much less secure device. First, the iPhone 4S runs iOS 5 to iOS 9, but many iPhone 4S owners didn't update to recent iOS versions. If the device runs iOS 7 or earlier, getting the content of the device is a piece of cake. The content of the device isn't encrypted as Apple started encrypting all data with iOS 8. Authorities can access this data quite easily. Second, if the iPhone is running iOS 8, remember that the iPhone 4S didn't have a Secure Enclave and Touch ID sensor. The Secure Enclave is a coprocessor that utilizes a secure boot process to make sure that it's uncompromized. It has a secret unique ID not accessible by the rest of the phone, Apple or anyone -- it's like a private key. The phone generates ephemeral keys (think public keys) to talk with the Secure Enclave. They only work with the unique ID to encrypt and decrypt the data on the coprocessor.
It is not surprising at all.
This assassination is being used to bring Turkey and Russia closer together. Turkey is blaming it on "gulenists" - a rich old cleric who split from Erdogan a couple of years ago and moved to Pennsylvania to avoid the dictator's wrath. Putin knows it was blowback from Aleppo and had nothing to do with gulenists, but it serves his purpose to let Erdogan do his conspiracy thing because Putin wants to peel Turkey away from NATO. And since Erdogan has basically gone full-dictator in the last year or so, the US has been saying mean things about him. Putin has no problems with dictatorship, kinda likes it, in fact. So he and Erdogan are getting along like best buds now.
You watch, Turkey is going to be the first country to ever leave NATO and its going to happen in less than four years. And Cheeto Mussolini is going to cheer it on too.