Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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...
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).
The info kept in the user's head is just a short PIN that could be cracked in seconds if they were actually used as the key. The security lies in the phone firmware/hardware only allowing a small number of PIN guesses before it wipes out the real keys.