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FBI Calls Apple 'Jerks' and 'Evil Geniuses' For Making iPhone Cracks Difficult (itwire.com)

troublemaker_23 shares a report from iTWire: A forensics expert from the FBI has lashed out at Apple, calling the company's security team a bunch of "jerks" and "evil geniuses" for making it more difficult to circumvent the encryption on its devices. Stephen Flatley told the International Conference on Cyber Security in New York on Wednesday that one example of the way that Apple had made it harder for him and his colleagues to break into the iPhone was by recently making the password guesses slower, with a change in hash iterations from 10,000 to 10,000,000. A report on the Motherboard website said Flatley explained that this change meant that the speed at which one could brute-force passwords went from 45 attempts a second to one every 18 seconds. "Your crack time just went from two days to two months," he was quoted as saying. "At what point is it just trying to one up things and at what point is it to thwart law enforcement? Apple is pretty good at evil genius stuff," Flatley added.

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  1. Re: Didn't have to bribe anyone to break every DRM by c6gunner · · Score: 4, Informative

    You're confusing different things. DRM and copy protection are relatively easily cracked because the keys used for decryption have to be available to the software/device in order for it to function; they're just obfuscated in various ways that make them difficult to obtain. On the other hand, when you encrypt a device yourself the encryption key/password does not need to be stored anywhere other than in your head.

    Finding a key which is recorded but obfuscated is not at all similar to finding a key which only exists in the brain of an individual. Especially if you're not allowed to use torture, or if the person in question is already dead.