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Apple to Close iPhone Security Hole That Police Use to Crack Devices

297 points by aaronbrethorst 8y ago

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> The Indiana State Police said it unlocked 96 iPhones for various cases this year, each time with a warrant, using a $15,000 device it bought in March from a company called Grayshift And what were the results? How many people did those 96 iPhones allow Indiana to bring charges against? In how many of those cases did Indiana prevail? And in how many of those was the evidence on the phone necessary?
- 21 8y ago
  > If we go back to the situation where we again don’t have access, now we know directly all the evidence we’ve lost and all the kids we can’t put into a position of safety. And equally important, how many children were "put into a position of safety" by cracking into these phones?
- zaroth 8y ago
  These are the wrong questions to ask. There's no doubt that total surveillance would result in more crimes being solved, and more criminals being successfully prosecuted. It's not a question of whether the technique is effective enough that it should be allowed. The question is can the government be trusted with a backdoor into our personal devices that "only they" can use? Should the people trust their government to only use that access lawfully, and can the people trust their government to protect that access from unlawful outsider access? Since we've seen nothing but incontrovertible evidence, throughout history and to this day, that government cannot be trusted with this level of access to our personal devices (lives), then I can only hope that Apple and companies like it will fight to provide us with secure devices, and that our courts will protect our right to strong encryption to protect our personal data.
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > There's no doubt that total surveillance would result in more crimes being solved I guess I'm doubting that. In any case, we're weighing costs and benefits in a limited context: access to a phone's data with a court order in hand. Framing an attempt to understand the benefits as "the wrong questions to ask" is counterproductive.
    - paulcole 8y ago
      Can I ask how you're doubting this: > Total surveillance would result in more crimes being solved With perfect and total information how would fewer crimes be solved?
      - Aaargh20318 8y ago
        When you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack adding more hay isn’t the solution.
      - squeaky-clean 8y ago
        Total surveillance doesn't guarantee "perfect and total information".
      - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
        I expect the rationale is that once governments have total access to phones, criminals will stop using them, and governments will still have the access.
    - Fernicia 8y ago
      But he's saying that even if the answer to your concern is satisfying, there are other factors which outweigh that benefit and should be considered.
      - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > there are other factors which outweigh that benefit How can you weigh a cost against a benefit when you have no idea how big the benefit is?
  - AckSyn 8y ago
    > can the government be trusted Full stop. No they can't. They should always be put on a short leash and when they're doing things we don't like we're supposed to stop them and/or vote them out.
  - menacingly 8y ago
    Actually, for practical purposes, your question is the wrong one. A lot of people think the more ideologically pure argument is the one to make, but it's usually the one with the least impact and least likely to bring about your desired situation. "Right" and "Wrong" are thrown out the window as soon as law enforcement makes the case that there is simply no time for the constitution. They're saving little tiny babies! but "OK, how many little tiny babies are you actually saving as opposed to blatant overreaches into the lives of private citizens" is the more effective point. The numbers will look bad, they can't help themselves once they get a whiff of some new power. In this case, arguing for the _idea_ of liberty (incorrectly) labels you a pedant more concerned with red tape than being a hero.
    - tossandturn 8y ago
      >they can't help themselves once they get a whiff of some new power Semantics, but I don't think it is necessarily the "power", so much as it is a new vector to get the evidence they feel that they need to perform their job with less effort. It is a lazy method that circumvents the laws that stand in their way for good reasons.
      - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > I don't think it is necessarily the "power", so much as it is a new vector to get the evidence they feel that they need to perform their job with less effort I am inclined to agree with you, but I have no evidence. Hence the questions. HN is well aware of the risks. But I've never seen any work done into the potential benefits. If the benefits are slim, then the discussion is moot. If there are cases that can be solved with phone data only, and if those cases are horrible or frequent enough, then there is a valid debate at hand.
      - sjy 8y ago
        No laws are being circumvented if the police have a warrant. The problem (from a law enforcement perspective) is that technology now makes it easy for people to communicate and store data in a way that the police can’t monitor even with a warrant. This wasn’t an issue when the police could obtain warrants to monitor telephone lines and break into safes.
  - slg 8y ago
    I see this line of thinking a lot in tech circles, but you really have to divorce this issue from the digital world. Imagine the exact same argument is about a safe instead of a phone. The government would simply request a warrant and then work on brute forcing their way into the safe. If you have the same objections when using a safe, the answer to the problem has nothing to do with technology because you believer there is a fundamental flaw in the US criminal justice system. You aren't going to be able to consistently defeat the government by repeatedly trying to outpace them technologically. You have to instead change the laws that govern their actions. If you think the rules should be different for a safe and a phone, you need to be able to explain why digital evidence should be treated differently than physical evidence?
    - Borealid 8y ago
      The government is allowed to crack open a safe with a warrant. The government is allowed to crack open an iPhone with a warrant. What does either of those things have to do with decrypting things found inside either the safe or the iPhone? If the FBI found coded papers inside a safe, they could try to decrypt those papers, but couldn't compel the owner to assist them. Security flaws are fair game for law enforcement. Secure encryption without exploitable weaknesses will probably defeat them even in the presence of a court order.
    - robbiep 8y ago
      Compare and contrast the different levels of effort required to gain access to a safe VS a persons iPhone prior to this data update. Authourities must first gain access to premises with a warrant and then get a safe cracker in. VS: authourities (at an airport or just about anywhere) take the phone off the person, there is a layer of obsfucation as to whether a warrant has been obtained or is needed, and data is collected. If you look at the history of digital data (ie echelon etc) there is a clear trend for vast data hovering of all and any resources. This is not possible with physical data, as it leaves behind a more concrete trail when authorities go after it, and causes them to (generally) be more selective about what they are doing
    - Bizarro 8y ago
      I consider the analogy to be does a manufacturer have a legal obligation to not make a safe that can't be broken into by the government?
  - bb88 8y ago
    > The question is can the government be trusted with a backdoor into our personal devices that "only they" can use? I think a better question is what happens when we go to a paperless society? Because it's coming, and search warrants will be useless in such a society. And while some of your rhetoric about the abuses of government spying on citizens is justified (e.g. COINTELPRO, Watergate, etc.), search warrants as a whole do far more good than harm. And I'd hate to see this power for prosecutors disappear just because drug dealers started using iPhones to keep their illegal activities hidden from police.
    - philipkglass 8y ago
      I think a better question is what happens when we go to a paperless society? Because it's coming, and search warrants will be useless in such a society. Were this true, crimes would have been practically unsolvable before about the mid 1990s. Back then nobody carried pocket computers/communicators (encrypted or otherwise) and criminals also largely failed to make paper records of their crimes. You can't smuggle guns via SMS. You can't vandalize shop windows over the Internet. You can't kill people with a digital photograph. Most crimes, and especially the violent crimes that scare people the most, require physical actions that leave physical traces. The major exception would seem to be certain white collar crimes: insider trading, trade secret theft, perhaps tax evasion and other financial shenanigans. That's where I can see secure electronic devices making law enforcement significantly harder. But when LEOs speak against encryption in public they usually seem to invoke killers and kidnappers, as if victims' bodies were now regularly hidden inside encrypted iPhones instead of car trunks and shallow graves. Maybe LEOs believe their own rhetoric or maybe they just realize that "think of the victims of inside trading!" isn't the sort of terrifying scenario that will get the public on their side.
      - robocat 8y ago
        > You can't vandalize shop windows over the Internet. You can't massacre people at a concert [snip]. You can't smuggle weapons over a border [snip]. I could commit these crimes over the internet by using others to perform them. So the people you catch are not the prime cause of the crimes. This was not feasible before the internet, and digital monitoring would be the only way to catch me.
  - Bizarro 8y ago
    Or simply, in free societies sometimes the bad guys get away with things. Or maybe they're not the bad guys and the state has deemed them "bad guys". And what's really pathetic is that societies don't have discussions about unintended consequences of laws, and that prosecutors don't have checks-n-balances on their power/authority.
    - berti 8y ago
      > Or maybe they're not the bad guys and the state has deemed them "bad guys". Fun conversation topic. A large proportion of people cannot comprehend such a concept.
  - sev 8y ago
    Even if it _were_ possible to only have the “government” have access to our personal devices and information, why would anyone want them to have that access? There are things I want to share only with my family, and ideally, I should have the ability to do that comfortably in this age of IoT. We won’t solve crime by allowing the government to spy on us; at best, it will cause the crime to be diverted or changed in form.
aphextron 8y ago
>In order to transfer data to or from the iPhone using the port, a person would first need to enter the phone’s password. (Phones could still be charged without a password.) So how long before the NSA has it cracked with power signal analysis?
- 21 8y ago
  It doesn't work like that. This attack requires the user to enter the password WHILE the NSA is monitoring the power.
- briandear 8y ago
  If we could ban parallel construction than any NSA exploit would be rendered worthless for domestic criminal prosecutions.
  - bilbo0s 8y ago
    There's a ban against law enforcement planting evidence on innocent detainees. That ban hasn't really stopped police departments across the nation from doing that very thing. https://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/city_settles_lawsuit_against_n.html https://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/city_settles_law... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/us/baltimore-police-corruption.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/us/baltimore-police-corru... Etc etc etc I'm fairly certain a ban on parallel construction would not do you much good.
codezero 8y ago
Isn't one of the main sources of data the iCloud backups?
- zaroth 8y ago
  Of course, from TFA; "The encryption on smartphones only applies to data stored solely on the phone. Companies like Apple and Google regularly give law enforcement officials access to the data that consumers back up on their servers, such as via Apple’s iCloud service. Apple said that since 2013, it has responded to more than 55,000 requests from the United States government seeking information about more than 208,000 devices, accounts or financial identifiers."
  - randyrand 8y ago
    That is an insane number. Jesus. Why don't they encrypt the data with my apple id password? Such a big security risk. It seems like hacking the iCloud servers is a much more obvious way for an attacker to get data.
    - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
      This has come up before and the current thought is that Apple won't do this because people themselves are idiots and forget their passwords and ask Apple to regain access to their iCloud data. Obviously if it's encrypted with the password Apple would not be able to allow them to regain access. I don't see any reason why encrypting it couldn't be a toggle switch, not on by default, though.
  - GeekyBear 8y ago
    When Apple announced iMessage in the Cloud at last year's WWDC the headline security feature was that the data would be stored on iCloud encrypted with a key that your devices would share with each other, but that Apple did not possess. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3zdqy/apple-is-trying-to-make-your-imessages-even-more-private https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3zdqy/apple-is-t...
- 8y ago
trumped 8y ago
It took a while... I wonder if Grayshift have their next hole already lined up so that business can continue as usual...
- 21 8y ago
  If this fix disables the data port when the phone is locked, presumably all future zero-days will be blocked.
  - CGamesPlay 8y ago
    Naw, the next 0day might rely on Bluetooth being enabled even while the phone is locked, for example. Or even the cell radio being enabled. There's always some vector for attack. (Even if it's none of these, the next exploit might be "we can decap the secure enclave and read/manipulate data on it with an electron beam")
thermodynthrway 8y ago
> and all the kids we can’t put into a position of safety "For the children!" They can't think of a good reason to have access to all these phones so they blantantly use an idiom so tired that it's practically a joke.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  I read that too, but it's quoted from a guy whose job is to protect children. The full quote: > “If we go back to the situation where we again don’t have access, now we know directly all the evidence we’ve lost and all the kids we can’t put into a position of safety,” said Chuck Cohen, who leads an Indiana State Police task force on internet crimes against children.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    >> all the evidence we’ve lost and all the kids we can’t put into a position of safety, There are two type of child abuse imagery: the new and original stuff that points to a kid currently being abused, the one can can be rescued, and the enormous mass of old material that forensic investigators have seen literally thousands of time before. Actual new abuse material that could lead to the rescue of a child is thankfully very rare. While these phones could lead to arrests, the likelihood of them leading to the rescue of a child is negligible. Once upon a time the bulk of images on phones were originals taken by the phone. Now "phones" are really just internet machines and the images they are looking for are essentially browsing history and stuff saved from online sources.
    - pm90 8y ago
      > While these phones could lead to arrests, the likelihood of them leading to the rescue of a child is negligible I think you're ignoring some aspects of how the US criminal justice system works. Arresting a child abuser is one thing; they have to be tried in court and found guilty by a jury/judge. Criminal cases especially have a high requirements to prove guilt since they are very serious charges. So even if unlocking the phones may not help save actual children from abuse, I think what the guy means is that you can get more convictions for these child abusers who have been arrested and prevent future children from being abused. Note that I'm not stating an opinion about the ethics of reducing security of phones, only pointing out what the person meant when he said that doing so prevents child abuse.
munk-a 8y ago
This article is written in a terribly slanted style bringing up constant adversarial comparisons involving apple and law enforcement. There is an objective point of view to the article but it bundles in a lot of quotes and references that are highly slanted. I am not someone who assumes all NYT articles are slanted, but this one is bad.
lev99 8y ago
> “They are blatantly protecting criminal activity, and only under the guise of privacy for their clients,”[Hillar Moore, Baton Rouge District Attorney] said. I understand a Law Enforcement point of view of having access to private data in order to prosecute criminals. I disagree with that point of view, but I would never say that point of view is a guise to implement a surveillance state.
- favorited 8y ago
  That quote jumped out at me too. Like, does he actually believe Apple is using "privacy for their clients" as an excuse to accomplish their true goal of protecting criminal activity?
  - sundvor 8y ago
    It sure looks that way. 'If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear' must be gospel for these people.
- wu-ikkyu 8y ago
  At what point does a state become a "surveillance state" in your opinion?
  - lev99 8y ago
    There isn't a single point for "surveillance state".
ppeetteerr 8y ago
If guns had the same safety mechanisms as the iPhone, maybe we'd see fewer shootings. You know, register a gun to an owner, not allow anyone but the owner to fire the gun, etc. (yes, I realize ownership is already registered, but you can circumvent registration through various means)
- gonzoflip 8y ago
  Gun ownership is not registered, except in a few states.
- lostapathy 8y ago
  It's also simply not practical to apply these mechanisms to guns without making them less safe or reliable. A gun must always work when needed for protection - it's not like software where it's ok to be "down", rebooting, or having battery troubles some of the time.
  - k_sh 8y ago
    A better hardware/software equivalent for a gun would be something like an AED or an insulin pump.
  - ppeetteerr 8y ago
    I don't think people use guns for self defense. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0804-hemenway-defensive-gun-home-20150730-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0804-hemenway-def...
    - JackCh 8y ago
      Whether or not owning a gun makes you statistically safer is another matter entirely from whether or not guns can be used for self defense. There is no shortage of real world examples of guns being used for self defense. So objectively they are used for self defense. They're also used for murder, hunting, target practice, looking nice on a shelf, etc. Incidentally, that article includes suicide. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not somebody should be permitted to make such a decision about their own life, statistics don't apply to individuals in the way you are implying. While you could determine that owning increases the rate of successful suicide in a population, you cannot say it makes that man right there, named Bob more likely to kill himself. Because you don't know anything about Bob. Bob may be the sort of man who never even fleetingly contemplates suicide once in his entire life. If Bob were such a man, owning a gun would not make it particularly likely for Bob to commit suicide. Furthermore whether or not Bob trusts his wife to not murder him with his gun is a matter completely removed from whether or not Bob ever uses his gun in self defense, or whether he owns it for self defense but never uses it for self defense (the later being orders of magnitude more common.)
zelon88 8y ago
It's frustrating that you never hear the pro-unlocking scene actually looking past their own noses. Like back when you could bypass a linux login screen by pressing backspace 28 times. Obviously that's a problem, but could you imagine if police departments all over the country got pissed when that bug was fixed and started complaining that they couldn't use the exploit themselves? Like they're the only ones smart enough to use the exploit and nobody else would ever do such a thing for malicious reasons. It's so short sighted.
- theclaw 8y ago
  I just looked this up and to save others the time, this was an integer underflow bug in the Grub2 bootloader's password protection[0], not Linux itself. Cool example, though. [0] http://hmarco.org/bugs/CVE-2015-8370-Grub2-authentication-bypass.html#exploit http://hmarco.org/bugs/CVE-2015-8370-Grub2-authentication-by...
  - VirtualAirwaves 8y ago
    C'mon. If it's part of a Linux distribution it's part of "Linux".
    - azinman2 8y ago
      Tell that to Richard Stallman, who will go ape if you call GNU tools “Linux”
      - Crontab 8y ago
        I like Stallman but he can be a pedantic prick.
        ovao 8y ago
        The “prick” isn’t necessary: you could just as easily have said that he can be pedantic and left it at that.
thinkloop 8y ago
The most surprising part for me is that iPhones have been relatively easily hackable by having access to the data port. That doesn't seem in-line with the high security advertised. What about the inaccessible hsm and all that other jazz?
- Shank 8y ago
  iPhones attempt to authenticate the port right now. A challenge system is in place if you connect an iPhone to a computer and want to authenticate it. The difference is that challenge is completely turned off with USB restricted mode. In other words, it's completely impossible for the challenge to start because the phone doesn't even let you talk to it while locked.
- alphabettsy 8y ago
  The company didn’t release the details of how their exploit works, but it is believed it is an automated brute force mechanism so it’s actually attempting to bypass security by trying passcodes over and over, not breaking encryption. This is another method to slow down brute force attempts.
- wool_gather 8y ago
  The GreyKey exploit most likely involves resetting the iPhone's state in between passcode attempts, avoiding the exponential timeout that you would face. It's a flaw, to be sure, but not particularly "easy". A bit more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16829478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16829478
paulpauper 8y ago
for enough money, pretty much anything can be backdoor-ed if it hasn't already. The FBI, CIA NSA,. etc have a huge trove of 0-days for this purpose. It's like "I thought TOR made me anonymous" ha you thought wrong.
hacknat 8y ago
The more I think about this issue the less interested I am in the extreme of either side. The government shouldn’t have unfettered access to our devices, but I can’t think of any other product in the history of the planet that gave people the ability to hide information so completely that the government could never look at it. To those that argue that our phones are an extension of our minds, that is both a bad thing and fetishizing our phones. Finally, couldn’t I argue that my diary or journal is an extension of my mind (certainly more so than a phone)? Yet diaries and journals can and have been subpoenaed.
- oleganza 8y ago
  Phrasing it "extreme of either side" sends a message that you place either extreme in the same moral bucket. Some people may argue that extreme personal protection is good and extreme personal vulnerability is bad, which makes these "extremes" quite opposite, making one highly desirable and another one not. Plus who decided that subpoenas are a good idea, or law enforcement traditions are how things ought to be? Inquisition and slavery were also a thing until they were not.
- uniformlyrandom 8y ago
  > any other product in the history of the planet that gave people the ability to hide information so completely that the government could never look at it. Any volume-level encryption?
  - TillE 8y ago
    Or anyone's who come up with a half-decent code that's stored only in one or two brains. There are various medieval alchemical manuscripts which have never been fully deciphered.
- buckminster 8y ago
  But the information being hidden is largely information that never previously existed. Specifically, a complete log of where you went, what you read, who you chatted to, possibly the contents of those chats, etc. It is a previously unimagined level of intrusion, which is perhaps justifiable once someone becomes a suspect, but not extending backwards in time for potentially an entire life.
gruez 8y ago
Doesn’t it seem strange that they’re not patching the actual exploit, only mitigating it? Do they have no idea what the actual bug is? Is the usb interface fundamentally insecure?
- jnbiche 8y ago
  Yes! I'm very curious if they've managed to figure the actual vulnerability. It's possible that they have, but they're concerned about similar bugs leading to the same situation, so they're just sitting down the whole approach.
- willstrafach 8y ago
  This approach mitigates the class of vulnerability, neutering the effect of this one and any similar future vulnerabilities. This approach makes sense, since they do not know what this specific vulnerability is.
  - jonknee 8y ago
    > since they do not know what this specific vulnerability is How do you know this? I'd be shocked if they don't have one or more of these devices themselves and have it completely figured out.
    - Torn 8y ago
      No way would the makers of the device sell one to Apple - they probably have strict measures in place to only sell to police departments, with contracts in place to prevent re-selling. Apple would have to buy one on the grey market, which they may be unprepared to do
      - jedberg 8y ago
        > Apple would have to buy one on the grey market No, they would have to pay someone to do "research" for them and figure out the vulnerability. They would pay that person enough to buy one on the grey market and figure out how it works, keeping their hands clean.
mappu 8y ago
> an hour after the phone is locked [...] In order to transfer data to or from the iPhone using the port, a person would first need to enter the phone’s password. An hour seems like a long time? On Android (at least, on my device) the USB port is always charging-only. For data transfer you must always unlock the phone and accept a notification for MTP/PTP mode.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  You don't have to hack into an Android phone if you are the police. The data is available to you in multiple places. (Including the phone.) That's why this semi-adversarial relationship exists principally between Apple and Law Enforcement. Not necessarily Google or Samsung and Law Enforcement.
- jonknee 8y ago
  > On Android (at least, on my device) the USB port is always charging-only. For data transfer you must always unlock the phone and accept a notification for MTP/PTP mode. Well this is obviously an exploit, not a feature. You have to unlock and specifically trust a computer if you plug your phone into one. The situation on Android isn't as cut and dry as you make it, you can for example plug USB headphones in and they will work without unlocking the device.
madoyle 8y ago
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wpdev_63 8y ago
Is that the one they use to remote exploit iphones? Or is that a backdoor?
kingnothing 8y ago
Why do we only hear stories like this about Apple and the iPhone? How secure is Android? Is Google taking the same approach to protecting their users?
- pxeboot 8y ago
  Google is definitely starting to take security more seriously with the Pixel: https://www.blog.google/products/android-enterprise/how-pixel-2s-security-module-delivers-enterprise-grade-security/ https://www.blog.google/products/android-enterprise/how-pixe...
  - alphabettsy 8y ago
    I’d argue they, as a company, always took security pretty seriously, but never privacy. FDE was pretty late and performed slow on early Android, among other issues.
  - bitmapbrother 8y ago
    I would say Google has always taken the security on the Pixel very seriously. It's also the reason why the Pixel phone was unhackable at Pwn2Own 2017 while the Chinese teams had their way with the iPhone.
- akhatri_aus 8y ago
  Apple is working into the AR space where privacy matters and they're working into that image for their brand. The structure of Apple's revenue sources makes it a sure fire bet to do vs Google.
  - jonknee 8y ago
    What about AR makes privacy matter? Apple has kept the same policy on privacy since way before it meddled in AR (and realistically almost no one uses AR, it’s photos/messages that people want private).
    - 8y ago
mirimir 8y ago
I highly recommend this 2016 paper by Stephanie K. Pell: "You Can’t Always Get What You Want: How Will Law Enforcement Get What it Needs in a Post-CALEA, Cybersecurity-Centric Encryption Era?".[0] She’s a former prosecutor from Florida, who now teaches at West Point. She agrees with security experts that maintaining such lawful access, against pervasive "strong" encryption, would require the introduction of vulnerabilities, such as backdoors or key escrow. Which would expose users to malicious adversaries. She argues, basically, that law enforcement has become lazy. She also raises the possibility of lawful hacking for smartphones, "infecting them with malware capable of capturing voice communications and keystrokes before they are encrypted." That brings to mind the FBI’s use of network investigative techniques. And of course, all those NSA tools. 0) https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1306&context=ncjolt https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
randyrand 8y ago
I always see headlines about this for iOS. What about android? Is it crackable?
- nicky0 8y ago
  Yes, easily.
S_A_P 8y ago
I have nothing to hide. I don't intend to do illegal activity with my phone. I also do not want a government entity to be able to access my phone or device simply because they can. I am also very skeptical of any government entity that uses "because child molesters" as valid reason to shame a company for respecting privacy.
Shivetya 8y ago
Perhaps then its high time we encrypt all personal computers as well by default.
- workaccount34 8y ago
  Ah yes. Windows 10 has a built in drive encryption. It should be enabled by default. (little do they know, it sends the encryption key to microsoft)

> The Indiana State Police said it unlocked 96 iPhones for various cases this year, each time with a warrant, using a $15,000 device it bought in March from a company called Grayshift And what were the results? How many people did those 96 iPhones allow Indiana to bring charges against? In how many of those cases did Indiana prevail? And in how many of those was the evidence on the phone necessary?

21 8y ago
> If we go back to the situation where we again don’t have access, now we know directly all the evidence we’ve lost and all the kids we can’t put into a position of safety. And equally important, how many children were "put into a position of safety" by cracking into these phones?
zaroth 8y ago
These are the wrong questions to ask. There's no doubt that total surveillance would result in more crimes being solved, and more criminals being successfully prosecuted. It's not a question of whether the technique is effective enough that it should be allowed. The question is can the government be trusted with a backdoor into our personal devices that "only they" can use? Should the people trust their government to only use that access lawfully, and can the people trust their government to protect that access from unlawful outsider access? Since we've seen nothing but incontrovertible evidence, throughout history and to this day, that government cannot be trusted with this level of access to our personal devices (lives), then I can only hope that Apple and companies like it will fight to provide us with secure devices, and that our courts will protect our right to strong encryption to protect our personal data.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > There's no doubt that total surveillance would result in more crimes being solved I guess I'm doubting that. In any case, we're weighing costs and benefits in a limited context: access to a phone's data with a court order in hand. Framing an attempt to understand the benefits as "the wrong questions to ask" is counterproductive.
  - paulcole 8y ago
    Can I ask how you're doubting this: > Total surveillance would result in more crimes being solved With perfect and total information how would fewer crimes be solved?
    - Aaargh20318 8y ago
      When you’re trying to find a needle in a haystack adding more hay isn’t the solution.
    - squeaky-clean 8y ago
      Total surveillance doesn't guarantee "perfect and total information".
    - DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
      I expect the rationale is that once governments have total access to phones, criminals will stop using them, and governments will still have the access.
  - Fernicia 8y ago
    But he's saying that even if the answer to your concern is satisfying, there are other factors which outweigh that benefit and should be considered.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > there are other factors which outweigh that benefit How can you weigh a cost against a benefit when you have no idea how big the benefit is?
- AckSyn 8y ago
  > can the government be trusted Full stop. No they can't. They should always be put on a short leash and when they're doing things we don't like we're supposed to stop them and/or vote them out.
- menacingly 8y ago
  Actually, for practical purposes, your question is the wrong one. A lot of people think the more ideologically pure argument is the one to make, but it's usually the one with the least impact and least likely to bring about your desired situation. "Right" and "Wrong" are thrown out the window as soon as law enforcement makes the case that there is simply no time for the constitution. They're saving little tiny babies! but "OK, how many little tiny babies are you actually saving as opposed to blatant overreaches into the lives of private citizens" is the more effective point. The numbers will look bad, they can't help themselves once they get a whiff of some new power. In this case, arguing for the _idea_ of liberty (incorrectly) labels you a pedant more concerned with red tape than being a hero.
  - tossandturn 8y ago
    >they can't help themselves once they get a whiff of some new power Semantics, but I don't think it is necessarily the "power", so much as it is a new vector to get the evidence they feel that they need to perform their job with less effort. It is a lazy method that circumvents the laws that stand in their way for good reasons.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > I don't think it is necessarily the "power", so much as it is a new vector to get the evidence they feel that they need to perform their job with less effort I am inclined to agree with you, but I have no evidence. Hence the questions. HN is well aware of the risks. But I've never seen any work done into the potential benefits. If the benefits are slim, then the discussion is moot. If there are cases that can be solved with phone data only, and if those cases are horrible or frequent enough, then there is a valid debate at hand.
    - sjy 8y ago
      No laws are being circumvented if the police have a warrant. The problem (from a law enforcement perspective) is that technology now makes it easy for people to communicate and store data in a way that the police can’t monitor even with a warrant. This wasn’t an issue when the police could obtain warrants to monitor telephone lines and break into safes.
- slg 8y ago
  I see this line of thinking a lot in tech circles, but you really have to divorce this issue from the digital world. Imagine the exact same argument is about a safe instead of a phone. The government would simply request a warrant and then work on brute forcing their way into the safe. If you have the same objections when using a safe, the answer to the problem has nothing to do with technology because you believer there is a fundamental flaw in the US criminal justice system. You aren't going to be able to consistently defeat the government by repeatedly trying to outpace them technologically. You have to instead change the laws that govern their actions. If you think the rules should be different for a safe and a phone, you need to be able to explain why digital evidence should be treated differently than physical evidence?
  - Borealid 8y ago
    The government is allowed to crack open a safe with a warrant. The government is allowed to crack open an iPhone with a warrant. What does either of those things have to do with decrypting things found inside either the safe or the iPhone? If the FBI found coded papers inside a safe, they could try to decrypt those papers, but couldn't compel the owner to assist them. Security flaws are fair game for law enforcement. Secure encryption without exploitable weaknesses will probably defeat them even in the presence of a court order.
  - robbiep 8y ago
    Compare and contrast the different levels of effort required to gain access to a safe VS a persons iPhone prior to this data update. Authourities must first gain access to premises with a warrant and then get a safe cracker in. VS: authourities (at an airport or just about anywhere) take the phone off the person, there is a layer of obsfucation as to whether a warrant has been obtained or is needed, and data is collected. If you look at the history of digital data (ie echelon etc) there is a clear trend for vast data hovering of all and any resources. This is not possible with physical data, as it leaves behind a more concrete trail when authorities go after it, and causes them to (generally) be more selective about what they are doing
  - Bizarro 8y ago
    I consider the analogy to be does a manufacturer have a legal obligation to not make a safe that can't be broken into by the government?
- bb88 8y ago
  > The question is can the government be trusted with a backdoor into our personal devices that "only they" can use? I think a better question is what happens when we go to a paperless society? Because it's coming, and search warrants will be useless in such a society. And while some of your rhetoric about the abuses of government spying on citizens is justified (e.g. COINTELPRO, Watergate, etc.), search warrants as a whole do far more good than harm. And I'd hate to see this power for prosecutors disappear just because drug dealers started using iPhones to keep their illegal activities hidden from police.
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    I think a better question is what happens when we go to a paperless society? Because it's coming, and search warrants will be useless in such a society. Were this true, crimes would have been practically unsolvable before about the mid 1990s. Back then nobody carried pocket computers/communicators (encrypted or otherwise) and criminals also largely failed to make paper records of their crimes. You can't smuggle guns via SMS. You can't vandalize shop windows over the Internet. You can't kill people with a digital photograph. Most crimes, and especially the violent crimes that scare people the most, require physical actions that leave physical traces. The major exception would seem to be certain white collar crimes: insider trading, trade secret theft, perhaps tax evasion and other financial shenanigans. That's where I can see secure electronic devices making law enforcement significantly harder. But when LEOs speak against encryption in public they usually seem to invoke killers and kidnappers, as if victims' bodies were now regularly hidden inside encrypted iPhones instead of car trunks and shallow graves. Maybe LEOs believe their own rhetoric or maybe they just realize that "think of the victims of inside trading!" isn't the sort of terrifying scenario that will get the public on their side.
    - robocat 8y ago
      > You can't vandalize shop windows over the Internet. You can't massacre people at a concert [snip]. You can't smuggle weapons over a border [snip]. I could commit these crimes over the internet by using others to perform them. So the people you catch are not the prime cause of the crimes. This was not feasible before the internet, and digital monitoring would be the only way to catch me.
- Bizarro 8y ago
  Or simply, in free societies sometimes the bad guys get away with things. Or maybe they're not the bad guys and the state has deemed them "bad guys". And what's really pathetic is that societies don't have discussions about unintended consequences of laws, and that prosecutors don't have checks-n-balances on their power/authority.
  - berti 8y ago
    > Or maybe they're not the bad guys and the state has deemed them "bad guys". Fun conversation topic. A large proportion of people cannot comprehend such a concept.
- sev 8y ago
  Even if it _were_ possible to only have the “government” have access to our personal devices and information, why would anyone want them to have that access? There are things I want to share only with my family, and ideally, I should have the ability to do that comfortably in this age of IoT. We won’t solve crime by allowing the government to spy on us; at best, it will cause the crime to be diverted or changed in form.

aphextron 8y ago

>In order to transfer data to or from the iPhone using the port, a person would first need to enter the phone’s password. (Phones could still be charged without a password.) So how long before the NSA has it cracked with power signal analysis?

21 8y ago
It doesn't work like that. This attack requires the user to enter the password WHILE the NSA is monitoring the power.
briandear 8y ago
If we could ban parallel construction than any NSA exploit would be rendered worthless for domestic criminal prosecutions.
- bilbo0s 8y ago
  There's a ban against law enforcement planting evidence on innocent detainees. That ban hasn't really stopped police departments across the nation from doing that very thing. https://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/city_settles_lawsuit_against_n.html https://www.nola.com/news/index.ssf/2008/09/city_settles_law... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/us/baltimore-police-corruption.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/06/us/baltimore-police-corru... Etc etc etc I'm fairly certain a ban on parallel construction would not do you much good.

codezero 8y ago

Isn't one of the main sources of data the iCloud backups?

zaroth 8y ago
Of course, from TFA; "The encryption on smartphones only applies to data stored solely on the phone. Companies like Apple and Google regularly give law enforcement officials access to the data that consumers back up on their servers, such as via Apple’s iCloud service. Apple said that since 2013, it has responded to more than 55,000 requests from the United States government seeking information about more than 208,000 devices, accounts or financial identifiers."
- randyrand 8y ago
  That is an insane number. Jesus. Why don't they encrypt the data with my apple id password? Such a big security risk. It seems like hacking the iCloud servers is a much more obvious way for an attacker to get data.
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 8y ago
    This has come up before and the current thought is that Apple won't do this because people themselves are idiots and forget their passwords and ask Apple to regain access to their iCloud data. Obviously if it's encrypted with the password Apple would not be able to allow them to regain access. I don't see any reason why encrypting it couldn't be a toggle switch, not on by default, though.
- GeekyBear 8y ago
  When Apple announced iMessage in the Cloud at last year's WWDC the headline security feature was that the data would be stored on iCloud encrypted with a key that your devices would share with each other, but that Apple did not possess. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3zdqy/apple-is-trying-to-make-your-imessages-even-more-private https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3zdqy/apple-is-t...
8y ago

trumped 8y ago

It took a while... I wonder if Grayshift have their next hole already lined up so that business can continue as usual...

21 8y ago
If this fix disables the data port when the phone is locked, presumably all future zero-days will be blocked.
- CGamesPlay 8y ago
  Naw, the next 0day might rely on Bluetooth being enabled even while the phone is locked, for example. Or even the cell radio being enabled. There's always some vector for attack. (Even if it's none of these, the next exploit might be "we can decap the secure enclave and read/manipulate data on it with an electron beam")

thermodynthrway 8y ago

> and all the kids we can’t put into a position of safety "For the children!" They can't think of a good reason to have access to all these phones so they blantantly use an idiom so tired that it's practically a joke.

ppeetteerr 8y ago
I read that too, but it's quoted from a guy whose job is to protect children. The full quote: > “If we go back to the situation where we again don’t have access, now we know directly all the evidence we’ve lost and all the kids we can’t put into a position of safety,” said Chuck Cohen, who leads an Indiana State Police task force on internet crimes against children.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  >> all the evidence we’ve lost and all the kids we can’t put into a position of safety, There are two type of child abuse imagery: the new and original stuff that points to a kid currently being abused, the one can can be rescued, and the enormous mass of old material that forensic investigators have seen literally thousands of time before. Actual new abuse material that could lead to the rescue of a child is thankfully very rare. While these phones could lead to arrests, the likelihood of them leading to the rescue of a child is negligible. Once upon a time the bulk of images on phones were originals taken by the phone. Now "phones" are really just internet machines and the images they are looking for are essentially browsing history and stuff saved from online sources.
  - pm90 8y ago
    > While these phones could lead to arrests, the likelihood of them leading to the rescue of a child is negligible I think you're ignoring some aspects of how the US criminal justice system works. Arresting a child abuser is one thing; they have to be tried in court and found guilty by a jury/judge. Criminal cases especially have a high requirements to prove guilt since they are very serious charges. So even if unlocking the phones may not help save actual children from abuse, I think what the guy means is that you can get more convictions for these child abusers who have been arrested and prevent future children from being abused. Note that I'm not stating an opinion about the ethics of reducing security of phones, only pointing out what the person meant when he said that doing so prevents child abuse.

munk-a 8y ago

This article is written in a terribly slanted style bringing up constant adversarial comparisons involving apple and law enforcement. There is an objective point of view to the article but it bundles in a lot of quotes and references that are highly slanted. I am not someone who assumes all NYT articles are slanted, but this one is bad.

lev99 8y ago

> “They are blatantly protecting criminal activity, and only under the guise of privacy for their clients,”[Hillar Moore, Baton Rouge District Attorney] said. I understand a Law Enforcement point of view of having access to private data in order to prosecute criminals. I disagree with that point of view, but I would never say that point of view is a guise to implement a surveillance state.

favorited 8y ago
That quote jumped out at me too. Like, does he actually believe Apple is using "privacy for their clients" as an excuse to accomplish their true goal of protecting criminal activity?
- sundvor 8y ago
  It sure looks that way. 'If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear' must be gospel for these people.
wu-ikkyu 8y ago
At what point does a state become a "surveillance state" in your opinion?
- lev99 8y ago
  There isn't a single point for "surveillance state".

ppeetteerr 8y ago

If guns had the same safety mechanisms as the iPhone, maybe we'd see fewer shootings. You know, register a gun to an owner, not allow anyone but the owner to fire the gun, etc. (yes, I realize ownership is already registered, but you can circumvent registration through various means)

gonzoflip 8y ago
Gun ownership is not registered, except in a few states.
lostapathy 8y ago
It's also simply not practical to apply these mechanisms to guns without making them less safe or reliable. A gun must always work when needed for protection - it's not like software where it's ok to be "down", rebooting, or having battery troubles some of the time.
- k_sh 8y ago
  A better hardware/software equivalent for a gun would be something like an AED or an insulin pump.
- ppeetteerr 8y ago
  I don't think people use guns for self defense. http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0804-hemenway-defensive-gun-home-20150730-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0804-hemenway-def...
  - JackCh 8y ago
    Whether or not owning a gun makes you statistically safer is another matter entirely from whether or not guns can be used for self defense. There is no shortage of real world examples of guns being used for self defense. So objectively they are used for self defense. They're also used for murder, hunting, target practice, looking nice on a shelf, etc. Incidentally, that article includes suicide. Leaving aside the issue of whether or not somebody should be permitted to make such a decision about their own life, statistics don't apply to individuals in the way you are implying. While you could determine that owning increases the rate of successful suicide in a population, you cannot say it makes that man right there, named Bob more likely to kill himself. Because you don't know anything about Bob. Bob may be the sort of man who never even fleetingly contemplates suicide once in his entire life. If Bob were such a man, owning a gun would not make it particularly likely for Bob to commit suicide. Furthermore whether or not Bob trusts his wife to not murder him with his gun is a matter completely removed from whether or not Bob ever uses his gun in self defense, or whether he owns it for self defense but never uses it for self defense (the later being orders of magnitude more common.)

zelon88 8y ago

It's frustrating that you never hear the pro-unlocking scene actually looking past their own noses. Like back when you could bypass a linux login screen by pressing backspace 28 times. Obviously that's a problem, but could you imagine if police departments all over the country got pissed when that bug was fixed and started complaining that they couldn't use the exploit themselves? Like they're the only ones smart enough to use the exploit and nobody else would ever do such a thing for malicious reasons. It's so short sighted.

theclaw 8y ago
I just looked this up and to save others the time, this was an integer underflow bug in the Grub2 bootloader's password protection[0], not Linux itself. Cool example, though. [0] http://hmarco.org/bugs/CVE-2015-8370-Grub2-authentication-bypass.html#exploit http://hmarco.org/bugs/CVE-2015-8370-Grub2-authentication-by...
- VirtualAirwaves 8y ago
  C'mon. If it's part of a Linux distribution it's part of "Linux".
  - azinman2 8y ago
    Tell that to Richard Stallman, who will go ape if you call GNU tools “Linux”
    - Crontab 8y ago
      I like Stallman but he can be a pedantic prick.
      - ovao 8y ago
        The “prick” isn’t necessary: you could just as easily have said that he can be pedantic and left it at that.

thinkloop 8y ago

The most surprising part for me is that iPhones have been relatively easily hackable by having access to the data port. That doesn't seem in-line with the high security advertised. What about the inaccessible hsm and all that other jazz?

Shank 8y ago
iPhones attempt to authenticate the port right now. A challenge system is in place if you connect an iPhone to a computer and want to authenticate it. The difference is that challenge is completely turned off with USB restricted mode. In other words, it's completely impossible for the challenge to start because the phone doesn't even let you talk to it while locked.
alphabettsy 8y ago
The company didn’t release the details of how their exploit works, but it is believed it is an automated brute force mechanism so it’s actually attempting to bypass security by trying passcodes over and over, not breaking encryption. This is another method to slow down brute force attempts.
wool_gather 8y ago
The GreyKey exploit most likely involves resetting the iPhone's state in between passcode attempts, avoiding the exponential timeout that you would face. It's a flaw, to be sure, but not particularly "easy". A bit more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16829478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16829478

paulpauper 8y ago

for enough money, pretty much anything can be backdoor-ed if it hasn't already. The FBI, CIA NSA,. etc have a huge trove of 0-days for this purpose. It's like "I thought TOR made me anonymous" ha you thought wrong.

hacknat 8y ago

The more I think about this issue the less interested I am in the extreme of either side. The government shouldn’t have unfettered access to our devices, but I can’t think of any other product in the history of the planet that gave people the ability to hide information so completely that the government could never look at it. To those that argue that our phones are an extension of our minds, that is both a bad thing and fetishizing our phones. Finally, couldn’t I argue that my diary or journal is an extension of my mind (certainly more so than a phone)? Yet diaries and journals can and have been subpoenaed.

oleganza 8y ago
Phrasing it "extreme of either side" sends a message that you place either extreme in the same moral bucket. Some people may argue that extreme personal protection is good and extreme personal vulnerability is bad, which makes these "extremes" quite opposite, making one highly desirable and another one not. Plus who decided that subpoenas are a good idea, or law enforcement traditions are how things ought to be? Inquisition and slavery were also a thing until they were not.
uniformlyrandom 8y ago
> any other product in the history of the planet that gave people the ability to hide information so completely that the government could never look at it. Any volume-level encryption?
- TillE 8y ago
  Or anyone's who come up with a half-decent code that's stored only in one or two brains. There are various medieval alchemical manuscripts which have never been fully deciphered.
buckminster 8y ago
But the information being hidden is largely information that never previously existed. Specifically, a complete log of where you went, what you read, who you chatted to, possibly the contents of those chats, etc. It is a previously unimagined level of intrusion, which is perhaps justifiable once someone becomes a suspect, but not extending backwards in time for potentially an entire life.

gruez 8y ago

Doesn’t it seem strange that they’re not patching the actual exploit, only mitigating it? Do they have no idea what the actual bug is? Is the usb interface fundamentally insecure?

jnbiche 8y ago
Yes! I'm very curious if they've managed to figure the actual vulnerability. It's possible that they have, but they're concerned about similar bugs leading to the same situation, so they're just sitting down the whole approach.
willstrafach 8y ago
This approach mitigates the class of vulnerability, neutering the effect of this one and any similar future vulnerabilities. This approach makes sense, since they do not know what this specific vulnerability is.
- jonknee 8y ago
  > since they do not know what this specific vulnerability is How do you know this? I'd be shocked if they don't have one or more of these devices themselves and have it completely figured out.
  - Torn 8y ago
    No way would the makers of the device sell one to Apple - they probably have strict measures in place to only sell to police departments, with contracts in place to prevent re-selling. Apple would have to buy one on the grey market, which they may be unprepared to do
    - jedberg 8y ago
      > Apple would have to buy one on the grey market No, they would have to pay someone to do "research" for them and figure out the vulnerability. They would pay that person enough to buy one on the grey market and figure out how it works, keeping their hands clean.

mappu 8y ago

> an hour after the phone is locked [...] In order to transfer data to or from the iPhone using the port, a person would first need to enter the phone’s password. An hour seems like a long time? On Android (at least, on my device) the USB port is always charging-only. For data transfer you must always unlock the phone and accept a notification for MTP/PTP mode.

bilbo0s 8y ago
You don't have to hack into an Android phone if you are the police. The data is available to you in multiple places. (Including the phone.) That's why this semi-adversarial relationship exists principally between Apple and Law Enforcement. Not necessarily Google or Samsung and Law Enforcement.
jonknee 8y ago
> On Android (at least, on my device) the USB port is always charging-only. For data transfer you must always unlock the phone and accept a notification for MTP/PTP mode. Well this is obviously an exploit, not a feature. You have to unlock and specifically trust a computer if you plug your phone into one. The situation on Android isn't as cut and dry as you make it, you can for example plug USB headphones in and they will work without unlocking the device.

madoyle 8y ago

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wpdev_63 8y ago

Is that the one they use to remote exploit iphones? Or is that a backdoor?

kingnothing 8y ago

Why do we only hear stories like this about Apple and the iPhone? How secure is Android? Is Google taking the same approach to protecting their users?

pxeboot 8y ago
Google is definitely starting to take security more seriously with the Pixel: https://www.blog.google/products/android-enterprise/how-pixel-2s-security-module-delivers-enterprise-grade-security/ https://www.blog.google/products/android-enterprise/how-pixe...
- alphabettsy 8y ago
  I’d argue they, as a company, always took security pretty seriously, but never privacy. FDE was pretty late and performed slow on early Android, among other issues.
- bitmapbrother 8y ago
  I would say Google has always taken the security on the Pixel very seriously. It's also the reason why the Pixel phone was unhackable at Pwn2Own 2017 while the Chinese teams had their way with the iPhone.
akhatri_aus 8y ago
Apple is working into the AR space where privacy matters and they're working into that image for their brand. The structure of Apple's revenue sources makes it a sure fire bet to do vs Google.
- jonknee 8y ago
  What about AR makes privacy matter? Apple has kept the same policy on privacy since way before it meddled in AR (and realistically almost no one uses AR, it’s photos/messages that people want private).
  - 8y ago

mirimir 8y ago

I highly recommend this 2016 paper by Stephanie K. Pell: "You Can’t Always Get What You Want: How Will Law Enforcement Get What it Needs in a Post-CALEA, Cybersecurity-Centric Encryption Era?".[0] She’s a former prosecutor from Florida, who now teaches at West Point. She agrees with security experts that maintaining such lawful access, against pervasive "strong" encryption, would require the introduction of vulnerabilities, such as backdoors or key escrow. Which would expose users to malicious adversaries. She argues, basically, that law enforcement has become lazy. She also raises the possibility of lawful hacking for smartphones, "infecting them with malware capable of capturing voice communications and keystrokes before they are encrypted." That brings to mind the FBI’s use of network investigative techniques. And of course, all those NSA tools. 0) https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1306&context=ncjolt https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

randyrand 8y ago

I always see headlines about this for iOS. What about android? Is it crackable?

nicky0 8y ago
Yes, easily.

S_A_P 8y ago

I have nothing to hide. I don't intend to do illegal activity with my phone. I also do not want a government entity to be able to access my phone or device simply because they can. I am also very skeptical of any government entity that uses "because child molesters" as valid reason to shame a company for respecting privacy.

Shivetya 8y ago

Perhaps then its high time we encrypt all personal computers as well by default.

workaccount34 8y ago
Ah yes. Windows 10 has a built in drive encryption. It should be enabled by default. (little do they know, it sends the encryption key to microsoft)