4 ms·

You misunderstand the SEP. It contains an externally unreadable private key baked in at manufacturing time that encrypts protected data. Your "wires" would read

You misunderstand the SEP. It contains an externally unreadable private key baked in at manufacturing time that encrypts protected data. Your "wires" would read garbage. The iOS security white paper is worth a read. Perhaps a nation-state actor could shave down the processor and read that key with a SEM or some crazy thing, but that's literally how far the design is supposed to have pushed iOS security. Which is what makes this hack so embarrassingly bad (if confirmed).

bufferoverflow 9y ago
SEMs are not that expensive. The cheap ones on eBay are $12-14K. The more expensive Chinese ones are closer to $200K. A security company can easily afford either.
- matthewmacleod 9y ago
  I don't think the acquisition of a SEM is the barrier to performing this kind of attack. It's still extremely hard
  - abalone 9y ago
    I think I read somewhere that some secure coprocessors incorporate physical defenses that will destroy keys if you try to shave them down or physically tamper. So yeah. Hard.
- whyenot 9y ago
  Getting a SEM would be the easy part. The hard part would be sample preparation and interpreting the results.
dheera 9y ago
> Perhaps a nation-state actor could shave down the processor and read that key with a SEM or some crazy thing, but that's literally how far the design is supposed to have pushed iOS security. Which is what makes this hack so embarrassingly bad (if confirmed). Shaving down the processor is hard but still possible. A government with a billion-dollar budget can probably do it, if they want, including after practicing on a million throwaway phones in the process. Apple's design is also known as security by obscurity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity). I much prefer an open design and security by high-entropy keys and well-established practices in the cryptography. I'd feel much safer using open cryptography libraries and strong passwords than arbitrarily and blindly trusting some secretive engineers at Apple. Apple's design is super-hard to break but possible. My Linux laptop, on the other hand -- the hard drive is standard SATA. Have at it. I don't care if you have a billion dollars, you'll have a hard time breaking into my data for a probably at least a few decades.
- abalone 9y ago
  That is just totally false. Apple does not rely on security through obscurity. They may not publish the code for the SEP but they do have a whitepaper that lays out the key architectural features.[1] The only reason your Linux laptop would be more secure than an iPhone is if you were using a high-entropy key to unlock it every time you wanted to use it -- and the iPhone wasn't. That's it. But remembering high entropy keys without storing them in some less secure manner is so inconvenient and failure-prone for most people that it's actually a less secure design than Apple's SEP-assisted approach. And you could opt-in to a high entropy key on an iPhone if you wanted to, so even that is a false comparison. [1] https://images.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf https://images.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pd...

bufferoverflow 9y ago

SEMs are not that expensive. The cheap ones on eBay are $12-14K. The more expensive Chinese ones are closer to $200K. A security company can easily afford either.

matthewmacleod 9y ago
I don't think the acquisition of a SEM is the barrier to performing this kind of attack. It's still extremely hard
- abalone 9y ago
  I think I read somewhere that some secure coprocessors incorporate physical defenses that will destroy keys if you try to shave them down or physically tamper. So yeah. Hard.
whyenot 9y ago
Getting a SEM would be the easy part. The hard part would be sample preparation and interpreting the results.

dheera 9y ago

> Perhaps a nation-state actor could shave down the processor and read that key with a SEM or some crazy thing, but that's literally how far the design is supposed to have pushed iOS security. Which is what makes this hack so embarrassingly bad (if confirmed). Shaving down the processor is hard but still possible. A government with a billion-dollar budget can probably do it, if they want, including after practicing on a million throwaway phones in the process. Apple's design is also known as security by obscurity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_through_obscurity). I much prefer an open design and security by high-entropy keys and well-established practices in the cryptography. I'd feel much safer using open cryptography libraries and strong passwords than arbitrarily and blindly trusting some secretive engineers at Apple. Apple's design is super-hard to break but possible. My Linux laptop, on the other hand -- the hard drive is standard SATA. Have at it. I don't care if you have a billion dollars, you'll have a hard time breaking into my data for a probably at least a few decades.

abalone 9y ago
That is just totally false. Apple does not rely on security through obscurity. They may not publish the code for the SEP but they do have a whitepaper that lays out the key architectural features.[1] The only reason your Linux laptop would be more secure than an iPhone is if you were using a high-entropy key to unlock it every time you wanted to use it -- and the iPhone wasn't. That's it. But remembering high entropy keys without storing them in some less secure manner is so inconvenient and failure-prone for most people that it's actually a less secure design than Apple's SEP-assisted approach. And you could opt-in to a high entropy key on an iPhone if you wanted to, so even that is a false comparison. [1] https://images.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf https://images.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pd...