Tidbits
Some people will try anything. In John Ellis Bush’s case he thinks that having his name scratched on the barrel of a gun represents America. Strange really…
The public officials don’t understand operatining systems: Apple order: White House says San Bernardino request is limited.
No, it isn’t limited. If Apple creates a new version of IOS that allows unlimited attempts to break the entry code, law enforcement would have a backdoor into all Apple devices. Once that version was out, no Apple device would be safe or secure. The government’s ability to protect sensitive software has been shown to be nonexistent.
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Nothing says “America!” like a foreign-designed gun manufactured by the American subsidiary of a foreign gun-maker. (The gun is a FNX-45, made by FNAmerica, a subsidiary of Belgian gun-maker F.N. Herschel).
Trump responded by tweeting a photo of a British Challenger II Tank and “AMERICA!”. Making fun of ¡Jeb! by tweeting a *bigger* foreign-made gun . Heh.
Regarding the request to hack that iPhone, the FBI’s justification is literally bullshit. They claim they need it in order to know who the dood was talking to. Bullshit. AT&T or whoever the service provider was has that call info on file, they keep it for years to comply with FBI orders. I think the FBI decided this was the time to try to make strong encryption illegal by taking on the biggest advocate of strong encryption.
He could have tweeted a picture of of the Trump Tower in Canada and titled it “New Hampshire” = taking a shot at John Ellis and Marco, Florida’s dynamic suo 😉
There is nothing worthwhile on that phone that isn’t available from the service provider thanks to the NSA hoovering. Get real, if the perps weren’t Muslims this would have been another going postal episode, rather than terrorism. They know who he was talking to, the fool who bought the guns.
I realize that I might be totally wrong, but I have to agree to accept any software updates on the iPad, so I’m wondering how Apple is supposed to get by that little roadblock to load the broken version the FBI wants. There is a built in assumption that Apple can access their devices and load software at will, when my experience is that Apple makes it easy to back-up so you can reload everything after the device dies. Nobody other than the Feds wants back doors.
Apple has a private encryption key that allows them to push a fresh image onto the phone via USB. This is in the boot firmware that actually bootstraps the actual OS. Think “grub” bootloader for Linux systems, except with magic keys for putting a new kernel on the disk and booting into it rather than being restricted to the kernels already on the disk. Thing is, usually this wipes out everything on the phone and puts it to factory fresh. After all, that’s how they image the phone in the first place at the factory and re-image it at the Apple Store if you brick it. The Feebs are basically asking for Apple to put a kernel on there that allows them to bypass the password lockout restriction. There are, after all, only 999999 possible passwords on the new iPhones, and trying one password per ten seconds would allow them to eventually exhaust them all, except for the fact that you can turn it on to wipe the phone after ten failed attempts…
IOW the current system is to overwrite everything. Given that the default recovery procedure is to erase and replace, Apple would be starting from zero to figure out how to do this. If doing this was easy, Apple Stores could overwrite the system without wiping out personal data, making for happier customers.
If I needed to do it, I would look at cloning the target phone and then trying passwords on the clones.
Cloning the target phone to a different phone or to the simulator (which runs under XCode on a Mac and allows you to prototype programs without actually installing them on a phone) would not work. The deal is that the firmware in the phone is locked to the Trusted Computing Module inside the phone. A clone will automatically brick itself when it notices that it’s running on a phone with a different TCM. You’d have to clone the TCM and that’s pretty much impossible, it generates a private key internally when first initialized and nothing outside the TCM has that private key, only a corresponding public key. You could perhaps clone the phone then repeatedly re-install the clone onto the same piece of hardware, but note that flash memory has a finite lifespan and once you re-flash the phone a certain number of times, that’s it, you’re done. And relocating the TCM from one phone to another is non-trivial, it’s actually glued to the inside of the glass and connected to the phone guts with a cable, and disassembling the phone without breaking the glass (and thus making it impossible to actually use the touchscreen) is basically impossible. When the Apple Store replaces the glass on an iPhone 6 and up, they end up having to re-flash to factory so that the phone can re-initialize itself to the new TCM with the new glass.
In other words, the phone was deliberately designed to make it hard to do what you described, which is why the FBI is itching to make Apple their test case. They want Apple to stop that, already. Why can’t Apple be like Blackberry and let the FBI into their system anytime the FBI wishes? (Uhm, maybe because Apple doesn’t want to become bankrupt and irrelevant like Blackberry? But that’s another story).
Based on what you have said and what I know, if doing what the FBI wants is even possible, it will be a major research effort on Apple’s part. This is not like handing over the keys to a safe deposit box, this would be a major research effort and someone is going to have to pay for it. This might end up costing more than the F-35, with a much lower probability that it will fly 😉
And the thing is, now that the FBI has brought this hole to Apple’s attention, it will be patched in the next edition of their firmware — in the next edition, if the Apple key is used to flash the phone, the old firmware will flash the phone back to factory default (by writing over the encryption header on the flash drive) before loading the new kernel into memory. Right now the Apple store can re-flash your phone without destroying your data, but it doesn’t *have* to be that way. After all, if you back up to iCloud or to iTunes (and you can encyrpt your iTunes backups), you can restore a “new” iPhone from that backup pretty easily. Apple’s backup and restore capabilities are awesome. I never was able to really do a good backup and restore of an Android phone…
I have never been a fan of Apple, but their back-up software is as good as it gets without buying an app, and better than most of the apps. That is something they have done right.
I don’t do anything ‘mission critical’ on my iPad, but it still gets automatically backed-up to the cloud, whether I want to or not.
Apple, and every other vendor should be hardening their products, not weakening them. The US faces a larger threat from information being stolen, than what may or may not be on an iPhone of a shooter in San Berndardino.
Especially since this was Farooq’s *work* iPhone issued by his employer whose usage was monitored by his employer. He and his wife’s personal phones, the ones that would have been used to communicate with terrorists, were destroyed by them. There’s nothing on this phone of interest to the FBI, it’s all a power play to establish a precedent that manufacturers can be forced to create back doors in their systems upon request.
People who are being sneaky use burner phones bought with cash and changed on a schedule. You buy the really basic ones that don’t have GPS, and you literally burn them when you are done using them.
There is no case left. The shooters are dead, and their accomplice who bought the guns is in custody. There is nothing to pursue. No one else was needed to plan an attack on a county workers holiday party. Finding a statement that the shooters thought ISIS was nice does not constitute a connection to ISIS. I realize that the Feds are trying to justify their existence, but write the damn wrap-up and move on.
I just read that Bill Gates is supporting the FBI but M$ is part of the industry coalition supporting Apple’s position.
As you said, this was a work phone, and if he got fired, he would lose it, so why would anyone think he would put anything of interest on it?
There is an article on Medium about the CA massacre, and the general insanity that brought it about, and the response. Worth a read:
https://medium.com/@jamesallworth/the-u-s-has-gone-f-ing-mad-52e525f76447#.vbxn6pkvl
Sorry to hit & run. Not been well, & things are very hectic. Catch you when I can