Apple Refuses to Build iPhone Backdoor

[Blackmarch]

On March 1, 2016 at 11:02 AM, unixknight said:

Congressional hearings on the matter.

This quote blew my mind:

“The logic of encryption will bring us to a place in the not too distant future where all of our conversations and all our papers and effects are entirely private,”

-FBI Director James Comey.

....like that would be a bad thing.

ARE YOU *#$*!@#!*( KIDDING ME?!?!?!?!?!?!  This yahoo is who we have running the FBI?!?!?!  This guy has a duty to uphold the law and he's whining about our ability, as private citizens, to safeguard our own privacy when the Government ignores the 4th Amendment.  Yes, Mr. Comey I realize that in a terrifying future we may well be in a position where we don't have to just take your word for it that you won't use the vast resources at your disposal to completely ignore our 4th Amendment rights.  How horrifying.

And then there's this mindless gem:

“We’re asking Apple to take the vicious guard dog away and let us pick the lock,” Comey said. “It’s not their job to watch out for public safety. That’s our job.”

This comment is completely idiotic because it is literally saying that only the FBI should be able to "protect" us.

Mr. Comey, you have failed in that regard miserably, because we're living in a time where the average American has more to fear from our own Government than we do from international terrorists.  You're just gonna have to cope with the fact that we'd rather handle our own safety,  thanks, and not continue to let thugs like yourself erode our freedom so you can play hero and grab more power.  It's bad enough we have already lost some of our liberties for nothing more than security theater.  You, and people like you, are EXACTLY the sort of threat George Orwell warned us about.

/rant

 

Probably a paranoid... Tho that might be more of the NSA department.

[unixknight]

13 hours ago, jerome1232 said:

So let's all do a slow clap for the FBI.

*slow clap*

They broke into the phone themselves (well they hired a third party to do it)

I'm guessing they figured out how to clone the contents of the image and bruteforce the multiple images? Anyways another slow clap for them.

They really should share the method used with Apple though, what poor sports.

 

http://money.cnn.com/2016/03/28/news/companies/fbi-apple-iphone-case-cracked/index.html?sr=twCNN032816fbi-apple-iphone-case-cracked1017PMStoryPhoto&linkId=22802920

This quickly?  Nope.  Apple did it.

Think about it.  Was Apple's motive in fighting the court order mainly about heroically fighting Government intrusion or was it about protecting their brand? 

And if it was about protecting their brand, Would they really say no if the FBI contacted them and said "Hey, win or lose, this fight would cost you massive amounts of money.  How about if you just do what we want, and in turn we agree to publicly drop the case to make it seem like you successfully warded us off and we found our own solution?  Win/win?"

What does a gigantic corporation, whose primary motive is profit, do?

Because I can tell you whatever mechanism the FBI would have used to decrypt that phone, it wasn't a brute force attack on the password.  In theory, they could have decompiled the OS, made the changed they wanted, recompiled it, and unlocked it that way, but a process like that is a LOT harder than it sounds, and would not have been completed this fast.

So if, in fact, Apple did unlock it for them secretly, everybody wins except the American public.

The FBI Wins:  It  now can get into iPhones at will, and the American public doesn't know how it accomplished that.
Apple wins: It looks like it fought the good fight and "beat Town Hall" as it were, and isn't to blame for the success of the FBI.  Anyone want to bet a week's pay against a jelly doughnut that an upcoming Apple ad campaign will feature its new and improved security over the current iPhone?

Does anyone believe the FBI would have just dropped the case on its own for no other reason, even after finding its own way into that phone, thus setting a precedent that companies can defy the Government?  Anybody?

[NightSG]

13 hours ago, jerome1232 said:

They broke into the phone themselves (well they hired a third party to do it)

I'm guessing they figured out how to clone the contents of the image and bruteforce the multiple images? Anyways another slow clap for them.

That would be my guess; a few thousand emulators running in parallel is hardly beyond the resources of any major tech company.  Especially one that specializes in data recovery.

The fact that it took them this long limits the usefulness of the hack for actual terrorism defense, though; plans made a month or more ago would have already been used or changed to the point where any information would be of very limited use for anything except criminal prosecution...which in this case is a bit pointless since the guy's dead.

[Blackmarch]

3 hours ago, unixknight said:

This quickly?  Nope.  Apple did it.

Think about it.  Was Apple's motive in fighting the court order mainly about heroically fighting Government intrusion or was it about protecting their brand? 

And if it was about protecting their brand, Would they really say no if the FBI contacted them and said "Hey, win or lose, this fight would cost you massive amounts of money.  How about if you just do what we want, and in turn we agree to publicly drop the case to make it seem like you successfully warded us off and we found our own solution?  Win/win?"

What does a gigantic corporation, whose primary motive is profit, do?

Because I can tell you whatever mechanism the FBI would have used to decrypt that phone, it wasn't a brute force attack on the password.  In theory, they could have decompiled the OS, made the changed they wanted, recompiled it, and unlocked it that way, but a process like that is a LOT harder than it sounds, and would not have been completed this fast.

So if, in fact, Apple did unlock it for them secretly, everybody wins except the American public.

The FBI Wins:  It  now can get into iPhones at will, and the American public doesn't know how it accomplished that.
Apple wins: It looks like it fought the good fight and "beat Town Hall" as it were, and isn't to blame for the success of the FBI.  Anyone want to bet a week's pay against a jelly doughnut that an upcoming Apple ad campaign will feature its new and improved security over the current iPhone?

Does anyone believe the FBI would have just dropped the case on its own for no other reason, even after finding its own way into that phone, thus setting a precedent that companies can defy the Government?  Anybody?

that is one possibility among others.

[Jojo Bags]

15 hours ago, unixknight said:

This quickly?  Nope.  Apple did it.

Think about it.  Was Apple's motive in fighting the court order mainly about heroically fighting Government intrusion or was it about protecting their brand? 

And if it was about protecting their brand, Would they really say no if the FBI contacted them and said "Hey, win or lose, this fight would cost you massive amounts of money.  How about if you just do what we want, and in turn we agree to publicly drop the case to make it seem like you successfully warded us off and we found our own solution?  Win/win?"

What does a gigantic corporation, whose primary motive is profit, do?

Because I can tell you whatever mechanism the FBI would have used to decrypt that phone, it wasn't a brute force attack on the password.  In theory, they could have decompiled the OS, made the changed they wanted, recompiled it, and unlocked it that way, but a process like that is a LOT harder than it sounds, and would not have been completed this fast.

So if, in fact, Apple did unlock it for them secretly, everybody wins except the American public.

The FBI Wins:  It  now can get into iPhones at will, and the American public doesn't know how it accomplished that.
Apple wins: It looks like it fought the good fight and "beat Town Hall" as it were, and isn't to blame for the success of the FBI.  Anyone want to bet a week's pay against a jelly doughnut that an upcoming Apple ad campaign will feature its new and improved security over the current iPhone?

Does anyone believe the FBI would have just dropped the case on its own for no other reason, even after finding its own way into that phone, thus setting a precedent that companies can defy the Government?  Anybody?

Talk like this could get you branded as a potential domestic terrorist.  Why would our beloved government officials do such a dastardly thing?  Why would Apple do such a dastardly thing?  How cynical and paranoid of you! 

It sounds very plausible.

Edited March 30, 2016 by Jojo Bags

[kapikui]

Apple basically showed that the FBI was lying through their teeth about the need for the specialized OS to hack the phone.  Apple (and several others) pointed out that there was absolutely no reason that the FBI's requests were needed technically, and that even if the FBI were that so grossly incompetent (to the point of deserving defunding) as to not have the technical capabilities of cracking the phone, within about a nanosecond of the case going public, hundreds of data recovery firms would be contacting them in hopes of getting the contract recovering the data.  That's what they do. There is no possible way that the FBI did not commit perjury in its court briefs, and Apple pretty much proved it. 

Apple showed rather conclusively that the ONLY reason the FBI could possibly "need" the things they said they did was for court precedent needs, not security needs.  The FBI wanted to vastly expand it's authority. When it was pretty much shown that that's all it was about, it kind of needed to go away.   

[jerome1232]

21 hours ago, unixknight said:

This quickly?  Nope.  Apple did it.

I think the FBI had a third party all along. They knew all along there was a way to do this without Apple. I think they thought they could play on the fear of terrorism to set a precedent. When they were met with public backlash they just fell back to the normal way of cracking things.

Perhaps there's an exploit out there, maybe there's a flaw in the implementation of encryption on that series of phone. Heck I'm not *that* savvy with encryption breaking but I do know there are ways of speeding up a brute force with precomputed algorithms and probably a host of other cryptology magic I'm not aware of.

[Blackmarch]

http://www.vox.com/technology/2016/4/1/11340480/iphone-hack-simple-scary

[unixknight]

Well this didn't take long.

A satirical tweet from the article:

Apple: If we're forced to build a tool to hack iPhones, someone will steal it.
FBI: Nonsense.
Russia: We just published NSA's hacking tools

And yet there are still people who think we should trust Government entities when they say "don't worry, we'll totally take care of this..."

[NeuroTypical]

[Scurries to read what I originally had to say about this...]

Yay!  I spoke mostly in generalities!  

Here's another useful generality: Just assume everything you do online is being watched and stolen by both good people and bad.