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Israel-Based Vendor Cellebrite Can Unlock Every iPhone, including the Current-Gen iPhone X, That's On the Market: Forbes (forbes.com)
Cellebrite, an Israel-based company, knows of ways to unlock every iPhone that's on the market, right up to the iPhone X, Forbes reported on Monday, citing sources. From the report: Cellebrite, a Petah Tikva, Israel-based vendor that's become the U.S. government's company of choice when it comes to unlocking mobile devices, is this month telling customers its engineers currently have the ability to get around the security of devices running iOS 11 . That includes the iPhone X, a model that Forbes has learned was successfully raided for data by the Department for Homeland Security back in November 2017, most likely with Cellebrite technology.
The Israeli firm, a subsidiary of Japan's Sun Corporation, hasn't made any major public announcement about its new iOS capabilities. But Forbes was told by sources (who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to talk on the matter) that in the last few months the company has developed undisclosed techniques to get into iOS 11 and is advertising them to law enforcement and private forensics folk across the globe. Indeed, the company's literature for its Advanced Unlocking and Extraction Services offering now notes the company can break the security of "Apple iOS devices and operating systems, including iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, iPad Pro and iPod touch, running iOS 5 to iOS 11." Separately, a source in the police forensics community told Forbes he'd been told by Cellebrite it could unlock the iPhone 8. He believed the same was most probably true for the iPhone X, as security across both of Apple's newest devices worked in much the same way.
The Israeli firm, a subsidiary of Japan's Sun Corporation, hasn't made any major public announcement about its new iOS capabilities. But Forbes was told by sources (who asked to remain anonymous as they weren't authorized to talk on the matter) that in the last few months the company has developed undisclosed techniques to get into iOS 11 and is advertising them to law enforcement and private forensics folk across the globe. Indeed, the company's literature for its Advanced Unlocking and Extraction Services offering now notes the company can break the security of "Apple iOS devices and operating systems, including iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, iPad Pro and iPod touch, running iOS 5 to iOS 11." Separately, a source in the police forensics community told Forbes he'd been told by Cellebrite it could unlock the iPhone 8. He believed the same was most probably true for the iPhone X, as security across both of Apple's newest devices worked in much the same way.
Telling them how the backdoor works.
Yes, Apple has a backdoor. They all do.
Our government works so hard to bypass security protocols for consumer technology. OK, so perhaps I'm naive. But a government what works for it's citizens should not be so focused on breaking into our computers without due process. (thank you Patriot Act).
At least there are plenty of us who are working on unbreakable hardware primitives in silicon that will keep these bastards at bay. It's about as nontrivial as it gets and we and many other have been at it for several years. The endpoint is pretty clear though. We will prevail.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"We have such data to show you."
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
No source checking and very little editing of their crowd-sourced articles. I have not seen this claim reported by any legitimate sources.
12:50 - press return.
This is soooooo cool though.
You can buy stolen iPhone phones dirt cheap (often for on a few dollars on older models), the all important stolen logic boards are damn near free. It's basically only worth stripping it down and selling the parts individually. But, If it was as simple as a 10 minute software upgrade, you could make Coke dealer money in no time selling unlocked iPhones as long as you were the only one doing it. Of course carrier lockouts are another matter but bypassing an iCloud lock would be extremely profitable.
What do you mean?
For how many years have they exploited them on AWS and other places?
They've accomplished what couldn't have even been done by Apple in their iPhone x key note.
There is a reason they have been expelled over three hundred times.
There is no device allowed to be sold that cannot be back-doored. There are bluetooth hacks that do not need bluetooth to be turned on, you need to be close, have a laptop with the hacking software. Wi-Fi hacks are an absolute reality. To think any device is secure is to be living in a fool's paradise. Ignorance is bliss I guess.
>. I'd like to think that if the intelligence agencies devoted their time and effort to helping companies identify security weaknesses and shore them up, we wouldn't be seeing massive data breaches every few months.
That sounds nice, but it really wouldn't matter. Note "the intelligence agencies" can't hack iPhones, it's a private company that can. The people a the intelligence agencies really aren't that smart. It's nothing AT ALL like the movies. It's people who got a certificate in cyber security but couldn't get a job in the private sector, which pays better (but expects you to know wtf you're doing). You think Google wastes a lot of time talking about PC bullshit? You should see government! Government doesn't hire the best people. They hire the "disadvantaged" people.
Many, many private companies are in the business of "helping companies identify security weaknesses and shore them up". Heck you can get services from companies like Alert Logic for tens of dollars per month; does your company have static analysis and daily scans?
Find it weird that we have seemingly outsourced civil rights and due process to a private company? And more weird that, as a profit-oriented organization, there is some actual protection there?
Since when did our governments decide their populations were "risk factors" and citizens desire for privacy were "non-actionable concerns"?
Yeah, I know the story. Just commenting on what a crappy place we are in.
.. that's that then.
Don't confuse the Jewish people with the corrupt government and intelligence apparatus of Israel. There is a reason Netanyahu has been referred for criminal prosecution.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It just works!
First, they ask the phone owner for the password. But then, they say "please".
Working on Intel ME, AMD Secure Processor, and ARM Trustzone as 'silicon primitives of security' makes him akin to the Clipper Chip designers of the 90s, not the cypherpunks trying to actually protect us from big Government and even bigger Corporations. :)
And just to prove I'm not trolling, my captcha was 'angler' :-D
Cos tells Marty, "We can change the world!"
The login security on a phone is definitely a technological measure to limit access to copyrighted content (e.g. photos and other copyrightable works that a user might store on their phone).
OTOH, law enforcement and those they contract have an exemption, per 1201 (E). But on the third hand, whatever technology they manufactured, was probably made illegally unless they were working under a US government contract at the time they did it. (i.e. if they already had the means to crack iPhones when the US govt approached them, then they very likely committed a crime.) On the fourth hand, they're not in the US and therefore subject to Isreali law, not US law.
Thus raising the question: Does Isreal not have a DMCA-like law? Because if they do, then they're probably a criminal enterprise in Isreal. And if they don't, then Isreal couldn't be a WIPO member.
Can you legally distribute stuff like libcss in Isreal?
iOS has a simple flaw. They tweet/text/whatever Q33 NYC in emoji.
We'd like to see the data on your phone anytime we want to. And now we can!
But don't worry, if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear!
Us government's relationship to its citizens is a custodial relationship that maintains exhistence only by threat of Harm or incarcerations to those replace their loyalties elsewhere. I like we have a choice not to deal with them. Don't trust the government they just don't give us an option to ignore or live independent of them.
A surefire way to stop the government and cellbrite / other 'hacker' corporations, is to install APK's hosts engine on every single device. This will allow the hacks to be blocked at the Kernel level, ring 0, instead of relying on software running in user space (which slows down and consumes MORE with LESS) using less ram and less CPU power, working with what you have, for free! It cannot be broken, even by the Israelis.
Kaspersky suggested that NSA may have, at one time, used code which was also used by authors of Stuxnet. We also know they purchased much of the code they used. That's quite far from "the authors of Sticker were NSA employees". There is no evidence that the developers were NSA employees. Indeed the fact that similar code is also found in incidents for which NSA has no motive strongly suggests that NSA is but one of the clients/friends of the authors.
> how can you claim that you could even begin to know how competently they operate?
I know them, I work with them. I'm not tremendously impressed by them. Federal hiring regulations and processes, and salaries explain *why* this is so. The *director* of the NSA makes $180K. That's only slightly higher than the *average* private-sector exploit specialist. That's the director of the agency. My boss makes more than that, and he can barely use exploitdb.
Here's how they do it:
If you remember awhile back, MH370 was lost. What you likely don't remember is that the majority of passengers were a part of a cutting edge semiconductor research company in southeast Asia. Shortly before it was lost a patent was published in the names of 6 people, a Rothschild and 5 engineers. One engineer died about a month before MH370 went missing, the others were onboard. The patent was for a room temperature quantum transistor capable of being mass produced with traditional semiconductor fabrication techniques.
So the word Cellebrite is actually a "play-on-words". The French word for celebrity is spelled 'celebritie. If you add an 'L' at the opportune position and remove an 'i' to make it a little more inconspicuous, you get the word 'Cellebrite'. This would be the same company Harvey Weinstein's ex-Mossad (Israeli) goons used when they were stalking American celebrities on American soil in violation of their civil liberties and furthering a wealthy sex offender's philandering. The agents would intercept the phones, use this software to unlock them, and leak any incriminating details to the tabloids to keep them spooked and in-line. Now they found a new customer, ie the Uncle Sam! ;)
Why do people constantly imagine that our security agencies have magic powers? Instead of guessing why don't you take a look at some of the leaks and find out. They have some smart nerds somewhere and they're well equipped. There was nothing really surprising about what they could do, there were no capabilities that I couldn't explain easily.
It's completely believable that the NSA sometimes lacks the ability to crack into some commercial products.
Why would you pretend like you don't know what he's talking about?
Completely different sort of LEO and it's no like there aren't a bunch of town cops who have set up little fiefdoms with a few of the other local power players. Maybe not your friend but there is zero chance that your understanding is actually this bad.
You got this part right:
> the budget for a datacenter with bazillaflops of GPUs, a petabyte of database dumps
> Typical blackhats have to work with their own deficiencies or form teams. They don't have a ton of say about the kinds of skills that they acquire for their teams. They don't have a lot of ability to do QA on each other's work
Red Dawn was a movie. When Albert Gonzalez (one of the Shadow Crew members) was arrested, the FBI seized $1.6 million in cash he had laying around at that particular house at the moment. You think Shadow Crew couldn't manage to use Git? To contract people with whatever skill they want?
Hamza Bendelladj used SpyEye (a trojan horse) to steal $400 million. That'll hire an expert dev with any skill you need, thousands of times over.
All those Nigerian Prince emails and all that - those aren't done a million times a day because nobody is making any money from them. One organization running email scams may employ a hundred people. "Telling anyone their shit's not up to snuff might mean they walk off and take as many assets as they can and leadership of the group can change in a weekend"? Not any more than at any other business.
This is an industry, not a movie.
See ... when Apple chose to simultaneously chose to sell out to the Chinese government but advertise the iPhone as a law enforcement defeat device, they made their bed. Their integrity is at best compromised, and most likely they are actively selling you and your country out.
If it's true that a firm would unlock any encrypted device, that would quickly become public knowledge because that evidence would be introduced in court cases around the globe, which it hasn't been. Instead, law enforcement is sitting on mountains of encrypted devices and I haven't seen one story where a Cellebrite-decrypted device was introduced into evidence at trial.
So who is responsible for that government being there, then? Is it the people of Yakyakistan?
Then Mossad should be backdoored by everyone.