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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.
If it is easy to crack for the FBI, it is easy to crack for anyone.
Any "back doors" will be converted to front doors ( or windows ) soon enough.
And the timing of such a statement. Meltdown and Spectre still in the news, then this.
emt 377 emt 4
Pre-cracked encryption is worthless. Might as well force everyone in the world to use TSA locks for physical security, where there are only 5 keys in the world that open them, providing no security at all.
The FBI is now indicating we should buy Apple devices because the security is good.
Apple isn't any "smarter" or "evil-genuis-y" than any of the other guys out there. They just decided to take their customer's privacy seriously. Google, Facebook, etc are just as smart or evil genius-y, they just put their targets elsewhere because having their customers' information more public is their business model.
Congress Is About To Vote On Expanding the Warrantless Surveillance of Americans
I think it's hilarious that they don't realize that it's their own insatiable desire to spy on everyone that is the primary driving force behind the spread of encrypted communications. That they don't realize this truth makes it all the more funny.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
They don't do it to thwart law enforcement. They do it to thwart criminals, terrorists, foreign intelligence agents (aka spies), etc.
If the law enforcement people happen to use the same techniques as those groups, well......
You're not the first Flatley to stomp your feet about something.
This is theater, and the FBI / NSA / sppok community at large obviously understands what you are describing. Statements like this are in part how these orgs "prove" to the gov't the need to pass laws to give them what they want.
The only brand of criminals the FBI will catch are the stupid ones.
The more intelligent types realize LE focuses on the phones too much and will simply ensure that they do not conduct their business via the devices in question.
They must know this so it begs the question once again: Are they really interested in criminals phones, or the ability to look at anyones phones on demand ?
Though the way LE treats folks these days, we're all pretty much criminals in their eyes.
It did cross my mind that they're simply blowing smoke to cover the fact that they have methods to break into them.
All the acting ensures folks believe they're still secure.
Just a thought.
I goes: "Oh please Brer Fox, whatever you do, please don't throw me into the briar patch."
I cannot believe we actually hire allegedly educated individuals to work in the FBI who can't fucking grasp the concept that Apple didn't make good security because of the FBI. Apple made good security because of the actual evil in the world, and to protect their customers.
Wonder how the FBI would feel if we turned around and started asking them the same damn thing about their encryption. How dare they make it very difficult to brute-force. Of all the nerve...
Come back when they're calling them "scoundrels" and "nerf herders".
Courts can order you to unlock your phone, which means that the FBI is talking about investigations, not prosecutions. I suppose it depends on the investigation; if the phone contains the location someone in North America of a nuclear device set to explode in the next hour, then it might be great if the device got unlocked. Google et al. just cooperate with law enforcement; Apple has opted not to give itself a back door so it does not have to deal with the drama. Public opinion might change after the mushroom cloud however.
Alternative Right.
A bunch of bitchy little girls.
The question, as always, is whether the good outweighs the bad.
If we could somehow create magical impenetrable *physical* fortresses that cannot be opened or accessed by the duly-empowered law enforcement and judicial powers of a democratic society, would we say that's just the way it is?
Or would we have a discussion about it on the context of public good and the rule of law?
There is no one "right" answer to a question like this save the ones we collectively and imperfectly come to as a society. Absolutist assertions that it is either unbreakable, impenetrable encryption for all, or nothing, are false.
I wrote this on an earlier matter:
Apple believes it is protecting freedom. It's wrong. Here's why:
http://cimsec.org/apple/22159
but geniuses? Thats a stretch.
- FBI
I don't read AC
Hate Apple products.
Hate Apple business tactics.
Hate Apple's complete lack of social responsibility.
Hate Apple design.
Their one redeeming feature: That they don't just make it easy for the FBI (or anyone else).
Tell them off and call them names for anything else, I'll be right there cheering you on. But insulting them because they won't deliberately weaken security just in case their users happen to be a terrorist? Yeah, that I won't just jump on board with.
We at the FBI are a bunch of lazy twats who regard the constitution as a piece of toilet paper if it makes our job harder. We also know perfectly well that any backdoor in encrypted software makes the encryption worthless but pretend otherwise in public because we only care about ourselves.
Basically either this guy is evil or an idiot and I'm pretty sure someone at the FBI understands how encryption works so I'm favoring evil. Either way it isn't a good situation for our civil right to have the cops demanding a master key to everyone's (figurative) house.
It's insanely difficult to root and audit the damn things. About time the FBI is working for us and demanding that we get control over the hardware we buy.
(Sarcasm is in the eye of the beholder...)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, that's not a default. Everyone with toddlers would be absolutely pissed if it were
Rooting Android devices to audit them is fairly trivial compared to Apple's stuff. And since 99% of the idiots are unable to secure their own devices, it's also fairly trivial to break in and get the information you want.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A product you can crack in two months with available technology still has essentially broken security.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Of course it is to thwart law enforcement. The FBI likes to pretend that it is trustworthy, history says otherwise. And of course, the US government is not the only "law" enforcement involved. Meanwhile we have yet to see a case they could not prosecute because of data on the iPhone, on the contrary we've only seen them trying to crack iPhones as a side note to an already established case just in case there is something relevant on there.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Makes you think the world is against Apple doesn't it? I bet it does. Tough old life.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to encryption this and that, from various forms of DRM to game console and locked bootloaders. It ALWAYS gets broken, sometimes shortly *before* the product is released. No need to bribe anyone;security is just hard because breaking things is easier than making things. It's a fact that if people can make it, people can break it.
Don't let the FBI know that they have a pool at their new building with "freakin' sharks with lasers" too !
There is a very distinct whiff of nerd resentment here. Don't you just imagine this guy as some popular "sports" kid from high school? It's the same anti-intellectual strain that goes into science denial. Whether or not this particular person feels that way, it's definitely the sentiment he is trying to tap.
Better Evil Genius than just Evil.
Mmm yes, cry more sweet tears for me, privacy invaders! Weep at the reality of encryption! Muahahaha!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Either I need to take my morning coffee or something doesn't add up...
Okay, so from 45 attempts per second to 1 attempt per 18 seconds.
That means that previously there was 810 attempts per 18 seconds, now there is only 1 attempt.
If the crack time used to be 2 days, shouldn't it have gone up to 1620 days, not 2 months?
#DeleteFacebook
Read his comments with a huge grain of salt. Either he is so ignorant of crypto that he thinks that raising the number of iterations is genius rather than normal practice, or he is intentionally making outlandish statements that are calculated to sway public opinion. It seems obvious that it's the latter, and it will probably work.
Why does he presume that people want security in their phones just to thwart law enforcement? I want security in my phone to keep everyone out. If law enforcement can get in, so can the bad guys.
Read his comments with a huge grain of salt. Either he is so ignorant of crypto that he thinks that raising the number of iterations is genius rather than normal practice, or he is intentionally making outlandish statements that are calculated to sway public opinion. It seems obvious that it's the latter, and it will probably work.
Speaking of public opinion, if I were in Tim Cooks position, I would hold a YouTube live stream and call this FBI agent out personally.
Let the FBI stand up there and rant and rave about how unbreakable Apple security is. Let the FBI bitch and moan about hacking attempts on Apple hardware being very difficult.
Then Tim will stand up and ask one simple question; "Why is it hard for hackers to break into your encryption?"
The FBI will provide an obvious answer, to which Tim will reply in front of the world watching, "Thank you for confirming why the fuck Apple takes security seriously." *drops mic*
What I read is "Your crack time just went from two days to two months"
To me that means it is still possible and not as secure as people tend to say it is.
If you are a person who want to keep things secret for whatever reason, two months is not a long time. 2 years would be a nice start. 200 woo;d be what I want for now
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I cannot believe we actually hire allegedly educated individuals to work in the FBI who can't fucking grasp the concept that Apple didn't make good security because of the FBI. Apple made good security because of the actual evil in the world, and to protect their customers
Please note that those two groups are in no way mutually exclusive.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
If we could somehow create magical impenetrable *physical* fortresses that cannot be opened or accessed by the duly-empowered law enforcement and judicial powers of a democratic society, would we say that's just the way it is?
We would have to. Total strawman you have there but I'll roll with it. To make it tangible the laws of mathematics are not bendable for the convenience of some and not others. Once encryption is broken by one party, it is a trivial exercise to break it for an arbitrary number of other parties or to simply distribute the data being protected. Once you have one key it's cheap and easy to make copies of the key and much more expensive to replace the locks. And once the data is taken there is no point since that would be like locking the door after the thief has already run off with your stuff.
There is no one "right" answer to a question like this save the ones we collectively and imperfectly come to as a society.
Actually there is a right answer here and air quotes are not needed. Your options are either to use encryption properly to keep data secure or to not use it at all and live with the consequences. There literally is no middle ground. Weak encryption or backdoored encryption = no encryption.
Apple believes it is protecting freedom. It's wrong. Here's why:
That article is a complete load of nonsense. The author is either an idiot or has an agenda. His arguments are flawed to their core. The argument is basically that bad guys are lazy and won't be bothered to take advantage of government mandated back doors. That argument is so stupid I barely know were to begin.
Google's customer are the companies who pay money to Google for ads. You do not pay any money to Google so how can you be their customer? You and your profile is Google's product which Google sells to advertizers. They take care to anonymize the data not because you will stop paying money to them (how can you ? you dont pay anything today) but because if profiles end up in their advertizers hands the advertizers can market directly and dont need to go through Google.
Ditto Facebook.
Apple actually gets money from you and me so it cares what we think .
**Life is too short to be serious**
We should have a 2nd Amendment for Nukes where all countries have nukes. May just make USA more polite and stop poking into others' backyards.
**Life is too short to be serious**
So what the FBI is saying is that it's fine for everyone to protect their data with a digital lock. But they really want to be given a master key that they totes mcgotes pinky promise they won't abuse or accidentally lose and most definitely not make copies of for their friends with benefits. It's different this time, they'll even stick a needle in their eye if they lie.
speed at which one could brute-force passwords went from 45 attempts a second to one every 18 seconds
What? Say again?
I'm pretty sure my iPhone doesn't take 18 seconds to verify my password. That would make logging in really slow.
No. After you start missing too many PW guesses, it starts increasing the delay between attempts, making it harder and harder to brute-force a PW, even if you DON'T have the "Erase after 10 failed attempts" option enabled.
Good backup defense, IMHO.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. I know there's a lot of idiots posting about the delay between attempts, but cracking a password doesn't work that way. You dump the data off the device, and then on a separate computer running the same algorithm you pound it as hard as you can as quickly as you can (hence why increasing from 10,000 rounds to 10,000,000 rounds would significantly slow cracking attempts). Delays work fine on remote systems you control, but are useless in a true cracking environment.
It's common to make the number of rounds large enough that on device it takes a second or so to complete, but 18 seconds on a cracking PC would probably be nearly a minute on device. That claim doesn't smell right.
Doesn't work that way with the Secure Enclave.
Read his comments with a huge grain of salt. Either he is so ignorant of crypto that he thinks that raising the number of iterations is genius rather than normal practice, or he is intentionally making outlandish statements that are calculated to sway public opinion. It seems obvious that it's the latter, and it will probably work.
Speaking of public opinion, if I were in Tim Cooks position, I would hold a YouTube live stream and call this FBI agent out personally.
Let the FBI stand up there and rant and rave about how unbreakable Apple security is. Let the FBI bitch and moan about hacking attempts on Apple hardware being very difficult.
Then Tim will stand up and ask one simple question; "Why is it hard for hackers to break into your encryption?"
The FBI will provide an obvious answer, to which Tim will reply in front of the world watching, "Thank you for confirming why the fuck Apple takes security seriously." *drops mic*
Oh, yeah!
Put it up on the Apple Events channel TODAY!!!!
Please now link to any Apple advertisement where they are deliberately targeting criminals. Or shut the fuck up and stop making shit up.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
This appears to be the actual vote so you can see how people voted.
Gripe: I wish news articles would include this link or something similar that makes finding this information easier.
It's user selectable to have either an increasing hardware-enforced delay between attempts, or wipe-after-X-attempts. iPhone defaults to the first behavior.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
HOSTS FILE is educated stupid! YOU are EDUCATED EVIL. Always 4-Corner QUAD-simultaneous HOSTS CUBE! No 1-Day God!
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I think that prior to some relatively recent consumer-level products, most of the information security technology available to non-government consumers was of the easily breakable variety. For example, I bought a Motorola cordless phone that purported to be "secure" so that my neighbors couldn't listen to my phone calls - then I listened to it on my scanner, and found that it mere inverted the audio signal, which could either be easily inverted back, or (with some practice) you could actually learn to listen and decode yourself. Until the advent of Windows XP and MacOS X, most consumer computers had either no real username/password protection, or easily breakable username/password protection. Even after consumer computers had username/password protection, physical access to the console trumped all protections. Alternatively, one could just remove the hard drive and analyze it in a different computer.
The government had access to some technology that produced better results... STU III telephones prevented eavesdropping or line-tapping from yielding much intelligence. Locking computers up in secure facilities with no external access and TEMPEST emissions protections kept information from disclosure. But these things are all very expensive and something that only governments can afford.
In the 2000s and 2010s this changed... full hardwire encryption is available on consumer devices. Mobile phones have secure enclaves and tamper-proof hardware that forms the foundation for some decent lockdown capabilities (that can be diminished for usability purposes). For those who desire it, an end-to end encrypted voice communication system can be had for not too much money.
In the past, I think law enforcement took about as much notice of consumer-level security as a good burglar does of the average lock on a front door (even if its a deadbolt) - i.e., none. It could all be easily defeated/circumvented. Now consumer-level security is starting to provide a real challenge to law enforcement, and they are taking notice. Having failed an early attempt to seize the high ground (the Clipper Chip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip), and now that usability has moved passed the PGP stage, the law enforcement community is seeing a future reality that they don't like much.
Learn not to speak Esperanto
tl;dr: Esperanto is badly designed, with a lot of irregularity and Eastern European-isms built into it, especially the choice of phonemes.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That of a random member of a huge organization always speak for and represent the organization as a whole?
Are they still orange?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Actually, for most phones the encryption keys *are* kept in the phone and obfuscated; they're kept in tamper-resistant hardware storage (which must be rather effective, otherwise the spies wouldn't be complaining).
IIRC, the keys are encrypted with the users PIN or password, and the (good) hardware is designed in a way which doesn't let you either dump the keys for offline bruteforcing or guess the PIN on the device itself. So you still need the PIN to actually access the keys.
You're right in that PIN based security is really a form of obfuscation though, which is why earlier iPhone models could be cracked relatively easily - they had flaws which allowed you to brute-force the PIN. On the other hand my android phone is encrypted with a 16+ character password, and the PIN only unlocks the screen, so if the device is turned off when you get your hands on it you're not brute-forcing it. If it's turned on you might conceivably be able to bypass the lock screen, but I think even that is pretty difficult on newer versions of android.
The phone cracked was a 5c, which was new in 2013. Supposedly the 5s (also 2013) and up are uncrackable. No idea if it's relevant, but the 5c was the last 32 bit iPhone.
To quote the article
"At what point is it just trying to one up things and at /what point is it to thwart law enforcement?/"
This is super ironic given that Congress just passed an extension of the law that allows the NSA to collect everyone's email and online communications WITHOUT A WARRANT.
I would ask Mr. FBI, "At what point are you guys going to admit that you don't give two shits about the 4th amendment, and you operate like you're above the law?"
Once the Feds come clean on being assholes and building a surveillance state that has 0.2% to do with fighting terrorism and 98.8% to do with averting civil unrest and regime change here at home, then they can start complaining about how evil tech companies are for allowing people to protect their communications from unwarranted search and seizure.
... so we can have reasonable conversations about cryptography and secrecy?
There, I said it. I'm probably on a list now. However, doing so would not likely to be by brute force. They like to play dumb but I'm guessing the people at the top that set the FBIs cryptography standards are a bit smarter than the FBI folk make themselves sound when they ham it up about Apple in the media.
Has it? Read again with eyes and mind open
This is pure theatre. Your iPhone (or Android) is p0wned before it leaves the factory. It's DUH LAW.
The FBI is just crooked national law enforcement. The NSA has a bigger budget and is in the business of breaking encryption. Likely it can crack an iPhone, but the FBI probably can't.
How about this phrase:
Milarodinotisizemenrajtvojtahubostnqmakraj
The most important password in my life so far is longer than this and I can type it without thinking in few seconds.
I wonder if anyone here might guess what is the principle behind it? Would dictionary attack work?
At some point the Deep State needs to realize that they work for the people, not the other way around.
Why not just fix society's shortcomings?
There'd be far fewer reasons to invade personal space if there were far fewer reasons to thwart society.
If (we) were all happy with our government and society, we could focus on progress.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
I think you have had one too many hits off of the bong, sir. I just said the entire US government was merely an employee of large corporations and banks.
Independent? Hardly. Sovereign power? Absolutely, though wielded at the behest of their employers, not the Constitution.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
Cracking 28 characters consisting of 4 words out of a 2000 most frequently used words dictionary: 2000^4 = 1.6e13 .
Except that two out of his 4 words aren't in your 2,000 word dictionary. So now what? Gonna try the whole dictionary?
I like to add some foreign words to my passwords, just for fun. How many dictionaries would you like to try?