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We used to have those in every Verizon store for transferring contacts and whatnot for people to their new phones. I used it for a cop one time and he said oh y
by sanex 3y ago
We used to have those in every Verizon store for transferring contacts and whatnot for people to their new phones. I used it for a cop one time and he said oh you're using a cellebrite huh? Those things are pretty incredible aren't they. I had no idea at the time that this was all a big deal. I actually thought they were cumbersome to use and slow. Transferring photos off an old flip phone could take hours, we refused to do it on smart phones once we started getting them. You also couldn't do anything if the phone was locked and on Android you had to enable USB debugging which is now hidden in settings.
- saagarjha 3y agoCellebrite has many offerings. The lower-level ones do data backup for stores like yours. The advanced ones break into modern iPhones.
- wslh 3y agoHow do they break current iPhones?
- xuki 3y agoNice try, Apple employee!
- wslh 3y agoIf I were an Apple security employee I would be checking the Cellebrite devices with my team and work on fixing any issue. Reverse engineering and debugging.
- 01100011 3y agoYes, assuming you can get access to one. Do you think Cellebrite would knowingly sell one to Apple?
- sanex 3y agoIIRC you don't even buy them they're all subscription based.
- jwells89 3y agoPerhaps I’m just naïve, but it seems unlikely that Apple couldn’t figure out some way or another to get ahold of them given the resources at their disposal. They could employ a full team whose only purpose is to reliably source Cellebrites by whatever means necessary and the cost wouldn’t even be a rounding error.
- bboygravity 3y agoI would be mind-blown if Apple didnt have any and all of those devices (assuming that they're actually interested in security).
- ronsor 3y agoA company the size of Apple has ways of acquiring the devices.
- greyface- 3y agoIndeed. Impersonating the cops in order to obtain hardware that they want is well-trodden ground for Apple: https://www.wired.com/2011/09/iphone5-lost-in-bar-more/ https://www.wired.com/2011/09/iphone5-lost-in-bar-more/
- jh00ker 3y agoIf college campuses routinely have their own "police department" surely, Apple HQ Security could expand to have a law enforcement agency?
- PeterisP 3y agoCellebrite won't sell that thing to most police forces (they might sell the service to them, in a way where they don't get their hands on the actual exploits), so I'd assert that it is tricky for Apple to get this. This is also supported by the fact that Apple has systematically not been able to timely patch the vulnerabilities used by Cellebrite.
- saagarjha 3y agoExploits.
- wslh 3y agoOk, so I assume they have a short life. I worked on the exploits business for other platforms/apps and you need to invest a lot for finding one. Once they are alive and 0-day discovered the vendor fix them. I assume the advantage here is the Apple difficulty to access these devices?
- saagarjha 3y agoI do not think they are discovered, usually. Cellebrite does not operate like other 0-day vendors, because they don't need to deploy their exploits.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoThey only have a short life when you aren't constantly adding new attack surface every year/iOS release. They will always have a steady pipeline with or without the maker's direct cooperation
- Obscurity4340 3y agoI'm pretty sure they do the same thing as a manual iTunes backup. A lot of the older phones with chips before A13 also seem to be variably vulnerable to being jailbroken with CheckRa1n where they can gain root access. It seems likely that Cellebrite uses CheckRa1n for a lot of older phones. There's also the issue of protection levels where if your phone has been unlocked once since boot (AFU), various keys are kept (possibly transparently) in RAM where they can be dumped somehow. Also, iCloud backup and several other dangerous "features" like iMessage are enabled by default whenever you sign in to iCloud so there's a few backdoors already standard to anyone who uses iCloud. If you sign in in settings, it automatically signs/opts you into iCloud, even if you don't want it.
- abwizz 3y agotrue, imessage and facetime have a long history of indecency and it's somewhat unfounded to assume they're safe now. cloud backups are also very problematic because they contain a lot of sensitive information and are not safely encrypted.
- ransackdev 3y agoThis isn’t the case if you enable advanced data protection > If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, the majority of your iCloud data — including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, and more — is protected using end-to-end encryption. No one else can access your end-to-end encrypted data, not even Apple, and this data remains secure even in the case of a data breach in the cloud. Which requires you first setup 2fa, which itself requires 2 keys. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212520 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212520 I’d be more worried about these ota security patches they can send out whenever and how easily it is to MITM that process and send down exploited security patches. I’m sure it’s already happening in the wild
- Obscurity4340 3y agoThe fineprint for ADP is that all the filenames and checksums/hashes, and various manipulation dates are all StandardDataProtection meaning Apple retains access. Think of ADP like a safe made of bulletproof but highly transparent glass. So an enormous amount of (meta)data is still available to Apple or anyone who can hack or compel cooperation.
- PeterisP 3y agoThey buy and build unpublished exploits and hide them so that they don't get patched - that's why the key software is tricky to get even for gov't agencies, some things for breaking fully-patched recent phones Cellebrite will only do in-house so that the customer can't leak and 'burn' the quite expensive exploit which was used.