Judge Forces Apple to Help Unlock San Bernardino Shooter iPhone

[Little Tich]

Source: NBC

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered Apple to give investigators access to encrypted data on the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters, assistance the computer giant "declined to provide voluntarily," according to court papers.

In a 40-page filing, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Los Angeles argued that it needed Apple to help it find the password and access "relevant, critical … data" on the locked cellphone of Syed Farook, who with his wife Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, California on December 2.

"Despite … a warrant authorizing the search," said prosecutors, "the government has been unable to complete the search because it cannot access the iPhone's encrypted content. Apple has the exclusive technical means which would assist the government in completing its search, but has declined to provide that assistance voluntarily."

Prosecutors said they needed Apple's help accessing the phone's data to find out who the shooters were communicating with and who may helped plan and carry out the massacre, as well as where they traveled prior to the incident.

Read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/san-bernardino-shooting/judge-forces-apple-help-unlock-san-bernardino-shooter-iphone-n519701

[longship]

1. If I were Apple, there would be no way to open an encrypted iPhone.

That way I could say, "Sorry judge, we just do not have that capability. And knowing the algorithm does not help."

[cstanleytech]

3. The question is though does such a way exist? If it does then Apple has to obey the

judge in this but if such a way does not exist then the prosecutor needs to pull their head out of their ass and move on.

[longship]

4. Well, the encryption algorithms I know of are all one way trap doors.

There is no analytical inverse function. It is just not solvable with any reasonable effort.
That is why encryption works.

And a back door just makes it insecure and subject to hacker attacks, in other words worthless as encryption.

[cstanleytech]

5. Yes, I am aware of most of that :)

The only way I could see Apple being able to comply is either there is such a backdoor in which case there are probably going to be alot of pissed off Apple users or there isnt or there is an exploit Apple knows of to atleast allow unlimited password guesses which they have not patched in which case there still might be some pissed off Apple customers.

[longship]

6. I am sure that there is no back door.

That would be cracked by hackers pretty damned quickly, rendering the security useless. Only an idiot computer company would put a back door in their code. And only an idiot legislator would require them to. And the whole idea behind the trap door is to make it very difficult to break the encryption.

Anybody really concerned about secure communications is going to use a pass phrase long enough that it would not be easily guessed, if ever.

That judge may be in a real pickle here.

Knowing the code in no way helps one crack it.

[Paulie]

9. They did starting in iOS v8

But older versions they still can.

[Geronimoe]

2. Hope they didn't wipe it with a dust cloth

as Hillary mentioned. when discussing her emails.

[LanternWaste]

20. I like to pretend my biases are relevant to the discussion, too.

I like to pretend my biases are relevant to the discussion, too.

[pintobean]

43. And your comments.

<Ditto subject line here>

[Kelvin Mace]

7. If you want to know who the shooters were talking to

the phone company will give them to you the phone numbers without a warrant. They have been doing it for the NSA for years.

[underahedgerow]

16. Most people I know are using almost any other option other than direct dialing anyone.

People looking to stay under the radar have countless options for keeping their communications footprint obscure, with many well known applications and probably even more discrete apps as well.

Apple is erring on the side of many legal issues and using these tactics only to protect their standing in the community and their customers. This is a major landmark legal issue. For them to protest and delay is normal, but in the end they will give in, I'm sure, because it really is the right thing to do, after all.

[Kelvin Mace]

17. Again, the phone company can provide phone numbers, texts and emails on its servers

they can provide IP address logs for sites visited by the phone. All this information is available with a conventional search warrant and is cheaper and far easier to obtain.

[randome]

18. But they want to access encrypted data on the phone, not necessarily call info.

Call info, I agree, is likely easy to come by. In a case like this, I would usually side with LE. But it's not clear to me what they're after on the phone itself.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]"The whole world is a circus if you know how to look at it."
Tony Randall, 7 Faces of Dr. Lao (1964)[/center][/font][hr]

[Kelvin Mace]

19. If LEOs didn't have a LONG and DISTURBING

history of abusing the powers they have, I would agree.

But they don't. I seriously doubt there is anything on the phone that can't discover with traditional investigative methods. I see no reason to grant more power to them until such time they are regularly held accountable for violating the law.

[randome]

21. I'd be more in favor of LE if they outlined -even broadly- what they think they might find.

But in this case, if they're just "looking to be looking", I don't see the need for Apple to be involved.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

[Kelvin Mace]

22. Precisely, it is a fishing expedition

and they want the courts to legalize it.

[Xithras]

31. There are practical limits to the usefulness of ISP info.

People who are deliberately trying to hide their information can mask it from their ISP. Tor Messenger, for example, will allow you to text chat with people around the world. Your ISP simply sees an encrypted connection to a constantly shifting list of IP addresses. Without accessing the application, it's impossible to determine who they were talking to or what they were doing.

[Kelvin Mace]

34. If they are going to those lengths

then I doubt anything useful will be on the phone. The whole point of Tor is to hide. If they have enough discipline to use such tools, they will also make sure to remove anything incriminating from the phone. I mean would you trust an American company not to sell you out if they get your phone?

LEOs should make use of the powers they have and not abuse them, before asking for more extraordinary powers.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

27. You must know some interesting people

Most people I know just dial the person's number, then talk. If some poor government agent is tasked to follow my communications, that must be some kind of punishment, and exercise in boredom.

I know there are other ways, using onions and Finland and such, but why bother?

[underahedgerow]

28. I talk to people all over the world, pretty much every day.... so I use whatsapp

and sometimes Facebook as well and occasionally, rarely, if someone is a bit of a luddite, skype.

I would rather use data than the phone... cheaper! My communications bill for unlimited data and phone service is about 60 bucks a month.

There's also a number of encrypted messaging services too, available worldwide. It's a wild world out there!

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

30. Yes, I can see using the services to save money.

Sending encrypted messages wouldn't be a priority for most people I know.

[TipTok]

32. That sounds a lot like...

"If you don't have anything to hide, why do you care if we look?"

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

35. Yes it does, sort of.

But it may be more rooted in laziness and ignorance. If I want to talk to someone, the easiest way is to open my phone and punch in a phone number. They answer, we talk.

I never bothered to look into more secretive ways of talking to someone. If I had a reason to do that, I guess I could research the topic.

What do you use, other than normal phone/email/text/skype, if I may ask? Are there other common communication means?

[TipTok]

36. I have the benefit...

... of military secure means of communication for voice, mail and chat.

For secure texting to civilians though I use Wickr. Timed deletion, multiple layers of encryption, told the NSA to go fuck themselves when they asked for a backdoor.

https://www.wickr.com/how-wickr-works/

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

37. My use of military comm ended in 1968.

And it wasn't very complex at that time. TWX, all caps teletype.

Things have advanced faster than my brain cell can keep up.

[TipTok]

38. Amazing stuff...

I prefer the guarantee of privacy to the guarantee of security so even if I'm just chatting with the wife I'll use a secure means.

[JustABozoOnThisBus]

39. Thank for the info on Wickr. nt

[targetpractice]

8. Good luck with that.

It's simply not possible by Apple's design.

Law enforcement should have tried using the shooter's finger to unlock the Touch ID fingerprint reader while their body was still warm. SPOILER: I just saw Fox Mulder do that on a new X-Files episode.

[muriel_volestrangler]

10. Apple rejects order to unlock gunman's phone (10 invalid attempts and it wipes data)

In a statement, Apple chief executive Tim Cook said: "The United States government has demanded that Apple take an unprecedented step which threatens the security of our customers."

"We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand."
...
If a device is locked, only the user's passcode can be used to access the data. If 10 incorrect attempts at the code are made the device will automatically erase all of its data.

Apple says even its own staff cannot access the data - a move the company made following the Edward Snowden revelations into government surveillance.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35594245

I suppose that if Apple did know, or could work out, a way to hack the phone, they'd worry that when the FBI got the unlocked phone, they'd be able to work out how Apple did it.

I'm surprised the FBI can't drain the battery, take the phone apart, and then power up individual memory chips in a way that bypasses the 'wipe after 10 invalid attempts' algorithm.

[NutmegYankee]

11. Good for Apple. It's time for a public stand against the police state. nt

[joshcryer]

13. Yeah, if they can bypass the invalid attempts.

...they can have infinite tries. It wouldn't be hard to crack it then, it's only 6 digits by default. They could, in theory, do it manually, would take a few days, but yeah. It's possible to implement a longer passcode length (with complex characters) but it's doubtful that the terrorists did that, but if they did, you could make some hardware to do it, plugging into screen entry code.

My guess is that the FBI doesn't know enough about the system to even waste one retry, much less 10, so they don't want to risk pulling the hack. They probably want 1) Apple to stop the retries and 2) completely disable the wipe mechanism. Those things are obviously in userspace.

[Xithras]

33. FWIW, the 10 tries thing actually CAN be bypassed.

By accessing the board directly, you can do a direct bit for bit raw dump of the stored data. It will come off the phone encrypted, but you'll have a "soft" copy of the encrypted file system.

Once that's done, it can be brute forced. Spawn a copy of the data file. Try 10 keys. Toss that copy. Spawn a new copy. Repeat ad nauseum until you find the key that works. A decently powerful cluster with a well crafted brute force algorithm can scan thousands of potential passwords a second. Because no attempts are made to decrypt the original source file, any copies made from it will have the full 10 tries. The only technically difficult part is performing the initial data dump from the phone, which I presume was the courts want Apple to assist with.

This is a fairly old forensic technique. As far back as the late 90's, computer forensic standards stated that hard drives should be Ghosted and that forensic work should always be performed on the Ghost images. This preserves the original data in an unmodified format (important for evidence preservation), eliminates charges of tampering, and protects the data from self destruct algorithms or other hidden trapdoors that might block investigators. Modern phone forensics works largely the same way. An image of the phone's storage gets dumped to a computer, and THAT gets analyzed. Never the original.

[muriel_volestrangler]

45. Data is encrypted with a 256 bit AES key, so they have to get a passcode for the encryption

system, which must hold the 256 bit key.

So while the iPhone's internal encryption chip uses a key with a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion possible values, the passcode to unlock that encryption chip only has 10,000 or 1 million possible values on most iPhones (if you're extra paranoid, you can enable alphanumeric passcodes, which have many more possible values). So if you're trying to crack iPhone encryption, it's a lot faster to try to guess the user's passcode than the underlying encryption key.
...
Apple has added two features to the iPhone to help defeat the attack. First, if the user guesses a password wrong several times, the iPhone will introduce a delay of up to an hour before it will accept additional guesses. Second, the user can optionally enable a self-destruct feature that will permanently disable access to the encrypted data by deleting information needed to unscramble it.

And this is where the FBI has sought Apple's help. The FBI isn't asking Apple to directly unscramble the data on the iPhone — something Apple couldn't do if it wanted to. Rather, the FBI is demanding that Apple modify the software on Farook's iPhone to make it easier for the FBI to guess his passcode. The FBI wants Apple to disable delays between passcode guesses, disable the self-destruct feature, and allow passcodes to be entered electronically over a wifi network or using the iPhone's lightning port. Taken together, these measures will allow the FBI to guess Farook's passcode much more quickly than it could have otherwise — and without worrying about triggering the phone's auto-wipe function.

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/17/11037748/fbi-apple-san-bernardino

As many jailbreakers are familiar, firmware can be loaded via Device Firmware Upgrade (DFU) Mode. Once an iPhone enters DFU mode, it will accept a new firmware image over a USB cable. Before any firmware image is loaded by an iPhone, the device first checks whether the firmware has a valid signature from Apple. This signature check is why the FBI cannot load new software onto an iPhone on their own — the FBI does not have the secret keys that Apple uses to sign firmware.
...
The recovered iPhone is a model 5C. The iPhone 5C lacks TouchID and, therefore, lacks a Secure Enclave. The Secure Enclave is not a concern. Nearly all of the passcode protections are implemented in software by the iOS operating system and are replaceable by a single firmware update.
...
Even though this 80ms limit is not ideal, it is a massive improvement from guessing only one passcode per hour with unmodified software. After the elimination of passcode delays, it will take a half hour to recover a 4-digit PIN, hours to recover a 6-digit PIN, or years to recover a 6-character alphanumeric password. It has not been reported whether the recovered iPhone uses a 4-digit PIN or a longer, more complicated alphanumeric passcode.

http://blog.trailofbits.com/2016/02/17/apple-can-comply-with-the-fbi-court-order/

I had been hearing that it was a 4 digit passcode they needed, and not 6 digit, or 6 alphanumeric characters, but perhaps that was a wrong assumption. But anyway, they need to attack not the data files, but the software/firmware/hardware that implements the reasonably guessable passcode. The model of phone appears to be before Apple introduced their "Secure Enclave", which appears to be a separate chip that I suspect could not just be cloned at will, and it's not clear from those 2 articles exactly what the encryption system runs on, so perhaps they would have a way of extracting its contents, but they may need special hardware to put it on.

[joshcryer]

12. Apple just came out saying they won't put in back doors!

http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/

[nsd]

14. Good.

(I have mixed feelings about this order, but, for the purposes of this post, I'm going to play devil's advocate.)

Apple's argument is that the order not only requires them to create new technology, but that it represents a slippery slope. Today the government goes after the San Bernardino shooters, tomorrow who knows whom they go after?

Leaving the technology question aside, I'm not very sympathetic to the slippery slope argument. I want the FBI to investigate the San Bernardino shooters and their fellow travelers as thoroughly as possible. I want the FBI to investigate white supremacists and Islamist terror cells and all the other bad guys. I want them to dig those people out root and stem. Who is more likely to hurt me and the people I care about -- the FBI or racists & religious fanatics? Clearly, the answer is the latter.

Likewise, I am more worried about ISIS and Putin and North Korea than I am about the NSA. I think the folks at the NSA are basically on my side. Snowden is a clown -- a self-indulgent, self-important millennial libertarian nincompoop. Really -- being honest -- I'm fine with what the NSA does. As enjoyable as being all indignant and righteous about NSA excesses might feel, the truth is that I don't care about what the NSA has done.

Bottom line: maybe the FBI and NSA sometimes cross the line, but the real threat to ordinary people comes from the sources of violence (domestic and foreign) they investigate.

[shawn703]

15. Well

The new technology Apple would need to create would also have the effect of doing irrevocable damage to their iOS line of products. Their encryption and security is one of the selling points, and they'd be open to lawsuits from millions of customers who sometimes spent around $1000 for their devices. It's also fairly short-sighted on the government's part because Apple is quickly replacing Blackberry in government agencies, and once this technology is created it's only a matter of time before it ends up in the wrong hands.

[Blue_Tires]

23. If Apple doesn't comply, would that be considered obstruction?

[razorman]

24. I don't think so. I'm not even sure how legal this order is.

My understanding is that the order is not for information or access that Apple already possesses. They are being ordered to create a "back door" that does not yet exist; basically ordering them to violate citizens' privacy. I do not blame Apple for resisting this. The federal government is not benevolent. If it gains the ability to crack anyone's phone at will, it WILL be used against us, and not just in this isolated instance.

[Blue_Tires]

25. I thought they were just requesting access to one phone?

So they wouldn't get it even with a court order?

[razorman]

26. Could be. But, I certainly don't trust them.

If they can force Apple to create a back door to this phone, it is a good bet that the same method could be used for others. If so, the feds will definitely use it in the future.

[justiceischeap]

29. They are but I think Apple's concern about this "one" case

is that the FBI would somehow reverse engineer the code and make it available to use for all phones. Imagine changing the lock on your house but the locksmith makes multiple copies of a master key and hands it out to everyone. Would you use the services of the locksmith again? I know I wouldn't.

I store a lot of information on my iPhone that I certainly wouldn't want anyone to get hold of (medical information, car insurance info, banking apps, credit card apps, my passbook wallet app stores travel info, etc.). I think it's right that Apple has no access to this data and I don't think the government deserves access to it either, even in the case of the San Bernardino shooters. There must be other ways to access who they called, like, I don't know, records from their cell provider.

[AngryOldDem]

42. Do you think this will stop with one phone?

If they get away with it once, it's off to the races with stuff like this.

[Blue_Tires]

44. Which also means criminals will be able to use Apple software

with full protection from prosecution, right?

[NutmegYankee]

40. Unlike an order to supply a physical key

This order requires Apple to create something that doesn't exist and something to which the company has a strong philosophical aversion against. I suspect this order will fail on appeal for right to faith/conscience reasons beyond just the slippery slope argument. It's like ordering a Quaker to create a killing machine.

[AngryOldDem]

41. Most people seem to be just fine with this.

Which reminds me of the Ben Franklin quote (paraphrased): Those who would give up liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security.

Welcome to the electronic age, folks. You can't compromise the privacy of millions in order to track down two. Apple needs to fight this so that the door isn't opened wider to even more intrusion by the feds under the argument of "national security."

[RoccoR5955]

46. Bingo!

You actually get it!
What they are actually doing is eroding the 4th Amendment, as if it hasn't been eroded enough already.

[Sentath]

47. Not where I've been keeping up with it they don't.

Mostly theverge.com and arstechnica.com

They've made it pretty clear that the request is for a general purpose hacking tool and that this is a very bad idea.

[AngryOldDem]

48. I'm referring to those who can't see beyond the terror talking points.

And they are legion. Not those who can see the broader implications (and dangers) of this.

Again -- the Franklin quote should be shouted from the rooftops. Not that anyone will listen.

I hope Apple does not give up this fight.