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NAND mirroring technique this article describe is just absurd. It would be more believable to me that FBI will try to steal the Apple's secret signing key or t
by ezoe 11y ago
NAND mirroring technique this article describe is just absurd.
It would be more believable to me that FBI will try to steal the Apple's secret signing key or to bribe the Apple engineers in two weeks.
- ctdonath 11y agoFor a government agency tasked with enforcing the law, it's absurd to contend they would steal and bribe to acquire evidence (victimizing one of the world's biggest & richest corporations, involving the "crown jewels" and/or significant engineering efforts, in the process). NAND mirroring is hard, but not impossible. (Whether the FBI can do it may be approaching absurd.)
- xresonance 11y agoNot absurd to contend they would steal or bribe. FBI's use of sneak-and-peek black bag operations is well-documented and has been going on for a very long time. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bag_operation#Use_by_the_FBI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bag_operation#Use_by_the...) In the book "The Puzzle Palace", there is a section documenting how the NSA pushed to get the FBI to reinstate blag bag ops after Hoover stopped them, so that they could recover cryptographic information to aid or obviate cryptanalysis. I leave judgement of the ethics of the practice and integrity of the organization as an exercise to the reader.
- tzs 11y agoIs it actually hard? See this discussion just a day or two ago of services in China that are doing iPhone memory upgrades for cheap [1]. This involves desoldering the NAND, copying its contents to a bigger NAND, and soldering the bigger NAND into the phone. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11331044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11331044
- ctdonath 11y agoActually doing it may be easy for those familiar with the details. Doing it with legally-provable assurance that you won't permanently screw it up, and proving chain-of-custody issues along the way, is hard.
- mikeash 11y agoWhat's absurd about it? The process sounds perfectly feasible to me. If you can perform the procedure, then it will definitely allow you to unlock this phone through a tremendously tedious but entirely doable brute force process. Try five passcodes, reset, try five more, repeat until done. I'd feel sorry for the special agent(s) tasked with entering sequential passcodes until one works, but the process would only take a few days if done continuously, or about two weeks if you stuck to regular business hours.
- jandrese 11y agoI bet you could build a robot with three stepper motors, a hot dog, and an Arduino to punch in codes for you pretty easily.