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Previously on SoylentNews: Apple Ordered by Judge to Help Decrypt San Bernadino Shooter's phone
Former NSA Director Claims Many Top Gov't Officials Side With Apple
Choice quotes from an interview with Gen. Michael Hayden (archive.is) on Wednesday:
"The issue here is end-to-end, unbreakable encryption—should American firms be allowed to create such a thing?" he told the Wall Street Journal editor John Bussey. "You've got [FBI director] Jim Comey on one side saying, I am really going to suffer if I can't read Tony Soprano's email. Or, if I've got to ask Tony for the PIN number before I get to read Tony's emails. Jim Comey makes that complaint, and I get it. That is right. There is an unarguable downside to unbreakable encryption."
"I think Jim Comey is wrong...Jim's logic is based on the belief that he remains the main body. That you should accommodate your movements to him, which is the main body. And I'm telling you, with regard to the cyber domain, he's not. You are."
And by the way? If I were in Jim Comey's job, I'd have Jim Comey's point of view. I understand. But I've never been in Jim Comey's job...my view on encryption is the same as [former Secretary of Homeland Security] Mike Chertoff's, it's the same as [former Deputy Secretary of Defense] Bill Lynn's, and it's the same as [former NSA director] Mike McConnell, who is one of my predecessors."
It's interesting for this opinion to be coming from this source.
[Continues.]
Another Take on FBI vs. Apple
There's a plenty of reason to believe that Apple complying with the FBI order is bad policy, it's legally shaky, and at least one of the people who makes the strongest arguments in this direction is now voting on a secret government board? What the heck is going on here?
What's going on is Justice Antonin Scalia is dead.
Had Justice Scalia not died unexpectedly a few days ago (notably before the Apple/FBI dustup) and had the FBI pursued the case with it landing finally in the Supreme Court, well the FBI would have probably won the case 5-4. Maybe not, but probably.
With Justice Scalia dead and any possible replacement locked in a Republican-induced coma, the now eight-member Supreme Court has nominally four liberal and four conservative justices but at least 1.5 of those conservatives (Justice Kennedy and sometimes Chief Justice Roberts) have been known to turn moderate on certain decisions. This smaller court, which will apparently judge all cases for the next couple years, is likely to be more moderate than the Scalia Court ever was.
So if you are a President who is a lawyer and former teacher of constitutional law and you've come over time to see that this idea of secret backdoors into encrypted devices is not really a good idea, but one that's going to come up again and again pushed by nearly everyone from the other political party (and even a few from your own) wouldn't right now be the best of all possible times to kinda-sorta fight this fight all the way to the Supreme Court and lose?
If it doesn't go all the way to the Supremes, there's no chance to set a strong legal precedent and this issue will come back again and again and again. That's what I am pretty sure is happening.
takyon: Apple's deadline to respond to the court's order has been extended from Tuesday to Friday. Twitter, Facebook, and Steve Wozniak have expressed support for Apple's position. Here's a blog post describing how Apple could potentially comply with the FBI's request.
(Score: 2) by tizan on Saturday February 20 2016, @12:32AM
If i understand well they want apple's help to prevent the OS to erase the disk after 10 failure of login....
Can't they just open the phone remove the flash disk (some soldering needed as ikea would have said it) and try ad-infinitum with all kinds of keys to decrypt the damn disk...Why go to court ?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Capt. Obvious on Saturday February 20 2016, @12:57AM
Apparently there is a piece of silicon with half the key on it. That piece is responsible for running the decryptiion (the other half comes in as the passphrase) and outputting the key. That piece also enforces the 10 tries and wipe.
If they copy the iPhone's memory (no doubt already done), they have to brute force the 256(??)-bit key. If they get the chip not to reset itself, they have to bruteforce a 4-10 character password.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Username on Saturday February 20 2016, @02:24AM
It’s not about the technology, skill or knowledge. They can just say National Security and get the chips specs, etc, and engineer a work around to decrypt it. But they stand to gain an advantage if they said they couldn’t do it and got the courts to set a precedence on encryption in their favor.
They’ll get the drive decrypted either way, they can’t lose.
(Score: 1) by Capt. Obvious on Saturday February 20 2016, @03:55AM
I'm sure that they already have the chip specs, etc. And probably from Apple as well (Every NDA I ever saw included language allowing compliance when the government came knocking.) In theory, it's impossible to read the data off the chip. I suppose some kind of memory probe if they disassemble the security cover (which I assume the gv't can do) could read the data.
What they cannot do is push new code to the chip, due to the chain of signing code.
Not that I necessarily agree with forcing Apple to comply. Certainly, I don't favor government having large backdoors. I don't know about how I feel about one-off forced unlocking.
Given what is likely on the phone, and that there are probably no living co-consipators, they win far more by being unable to decrypt the drive. The glorious "what could have been" far outweighs anything they were going to get.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gravis on Saturday February 20 2016, @06:36AM
Apparently there is a piece of silicon with half the key on it. That piece is responsible for running the decryptiion (the other half comes in as the passphrase) and outputting the key. That piece also enforces the 10 tries and wipe.
but here's the thing, this is the FBI and they have the resources to have someone actually edit the silicon using a Focused Ion Beam. [wikipedia.org] The problem is that this is slow and expensive to do and the FBI doesn't want to "just unlock this one iPhone," they want to be able to unlock any iPhone, despite what they are saying. However, I find this still to be highly suspect because previously released firmware would try to unlock the phone before decrementing the "unlock attempts remaining" counter and they got around it by cutting power to the phone after it failed but before it decremented the counter. What this means is that either this version of the iPhone never had that issue or they are putting on a show.
(Score: 1) by Capt. Obvious on Saturday February 20 2016, @08:36AM
Probably true. I know that the FBI has a ton of resources. And I have no objection to them modifying the hardware to break the encryption (on this phone that they have a warrant to look at.)
It's most likely a twofer - turn public opinion against strong encryption, and deflect blame for not being able to learn anything more about the incident (because if they admit that they cannot learn anything more, then they have to admit that sometimes you cannot prevent things.)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by AnonTechie on Saturday February 20 2016, @12:51PM
Another Update:
The San Bernardino Health Dept. Reset Syed Farook's Password, Which Is Why We're Now In This Mess
Footnote 7, on page 18 details four possible ways that Apple and the FBI had previously discussed accessing the content on the device without having to undermine the basic security system of the iPhone, and one of them only failed because Farook's employers reset the password after the attacks, in an attempt to get into the device.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/apple-terrorists-appleid-passcode-changed-in-government-cust [buzzfeed.com]
Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."