6 ms·
IPhone vulnerability leaves your data wide open, even when using a PIN
- tptacek 16y agoUh huh. Because the other phones on the market? When you plug them into a USB port? Impregnable.
- itistoday 16y agoJustifying your shortcomings "because everyone else has them" is a recipe for failure, and doesn't get rid of the fact that there's a shortcoming. In this case, a rather significant one.
- tptacek 16y agoThat's besides the point. I'm not justifying anyone. I'm saying the article is presenting a false choice, between a phone with a known physical security issue and a fictitious phone without one, and claiming that choice should influence enterprise buying.
- Locke1689 16y agoRight. It's like they're insinuating that there's some mythical smartphone with an HSM FIPS 140-2 L4 compatible crypto chip. Face it, if someone wants the data on your smartphone they can get it.
- winthrowe 16y agoLike blackberries? http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cmvp/documents/140-1/1401val2005.htm http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cmvp/documents/140-1/1401val... edit: I'm no expert and read too quickly the level 4 you mentioned, but at least isn't overall level 1 better than iphone's overall level 0?
- Locke1689 16y agoNot especially. If memory isn't tamper proof and you get a hold of a phone that's on (very likely) then you can just dump the RAM and scour for the encryption key.
- Locke1689 16y ago@winthrow Overall Level: 1 Edit: To those who downvote, please read up on the full FIPS 140-2 specification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_140-2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_140-2
- tedunangst 16y agoDid anybody think the data was encrypted? Does anybody think a four digit pin is a sufficient key for encryption?
- stcredzero 16y agoSure, here's one way to do it. The PIN is handled by hardware, which sends a longer decryption key (128 bit, say?) to encrypted disk hardware, then yes. You'd have to disable the 4 digit PIN decryption if more than 15 or so attempts in a row fail. (But perhaps have a much longer passphrase for recovery.) With this scheme, the data is protected by a 128 bit symmetric cipher key. There is a small chance that the PIN could be guessed by luck (0.15%) but this is much better than nothing.
- Locke1689 16y agoFor the most part, I wouldn't trust encrypted disk hardware. The relevant standard for this sort of thing is NIST FIPS 140-2. Edit: You'd have to disable the 4 digit PIN decryption if more than 15 or so attempts in a row fail. On second thought, there are numerous ways this could be vulnerable to a side-channel attack.
- stcredzero 16y agoIt would still make it more difficult than plugging the device into a Linux box. Would the side channel attack work if you only had access to one particular iPad on one occasion? EDIT: One side channel that would be nasty - the greasy fingerprints on the keypad! (Perhaps the keypad could move to random locations?)
- tedunangst 16y agoEven if the keys are 128 bits long, if there's only 10000 of them, it doesn't do much good.
- stcredzero 16y agoPlease work on reading comprehension. You'd only be able to try 15 of them. That gives you a 0.15% chance of guessing. That's far bigger than 15/(2^128), but I wasn't proposing an optimized system. From the standpoint of industrial espionage operation, a 0.15% chance of success is pretty dismal. This is only good for the standpoint of protecting a particular device. If there is a secret that absolutely must be protected on every single device, I think that the company's security has much bigger problems than iPhone PINs.
- noelchurchill 16y agoCan't you hack just about any computer given physical access and being able to plug another computer into it?
- dshep 16y agojust imagine what kind of access you'd get if you plugged it into a mac? and PS. does this mean you can sync music to an iphone in linux? if so, cool!
- mirkules 16y agoAFAIK, you get no access other than through iTunes. The iPhone storage volume doesn't mount in OS X the way regular USB drives do. If anyone knows something different, enlighten me (I'd love to use it as a portable HD)
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- ryanpetrich 16y agoThe software to do this has been available for a long time now. iTunes requires devices to be unlocked via a passcode to perform a sync, but that's a courtesy--the AFC service running on the device allows full access to the user partition from the USB interface without restriction.
- timmorgan 16y agoApple, please don't encrypt stuff on my iPhone. It's hard enough to copy music to/from it from my Linux machine as it is.