FBI get into San Bernardino gunman's iPhone without Apple

[Rob_B]

Developing story

This was pretty quick, I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing. I'm happy Apple didn't creak but now have the floodgates opened?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-35914195

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Supposedly the used this Israeli firm:

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35883441

Edit!!

Hmm:

http://www.fudzilla.com/news/mobile/...siness-partner

[Rob_B]

Yeah I'd heard that, physical chip extraction it seems. I read somewhere that Apple are/have implemented something that can stop this as well but obviously not for the 5C

[peterb]

Making a device unconditionally secure is quite tricky, and certainly not cheap, so it isn't really surprising that a mass consumer commodity product should be vulnerable to a determined and skilled attack.

[Ferral]

I can see where Apple are coming from with user security and so on but I really do think that they should have co operated with the FBI over something like this, the potential for innocent peoples lives could well be at risk in not doing what the FBI asked.

[ik9000]

I can see where Apple are coming from with user security and so on but I really do think that they should have co operated with the FBI over something like this, the potential for innocent peoples lives could well be at risk in not doing what the FBI asked.

I can see where you're coming from, but frankly there comes a point at which privacy matters. And I'd rather know that my phone is secure, than that the government can look in someone's phone after they've done something nasty. Freedom carries with it the risk of attacks etc - but I'd rather have freedom than state snooping. It doesn't take much for such powers to start to be misused. Our government is trying to snoop citing "security" and looking for bad guys, but they;re trying to find the needle in the haystack by making the haystack bigger. Makes no sense.

Now in the US they have tech they need to get in and someone has helped them do so. Good on them. But it does not mean manufacturers should be deliberately building in back-doors. That is not secure, and not sensible.

[Ferral]

I can see where you're coming from, but frankly there comes a point at which privacy matters. And I'd rather know that my phone is secure, than that the government can look in someone's phone after they've done something nasty. Freedom carries with it the risk of attacks etc - but I'd rather have freedom than state snooping. It doesn't take much for such powers to start to be misused.

It is one of those Catch 22 situations, privacy of any usual person fair play but when you have acts of terrorism I honestly feel that the individual is essentially giving up their rights, do they care about the people that they aimlesslely and indiscriminitaly kill for whatever belief? No they don't, they believe in whatever they have been brainwashed into doing and murder innocent people that would have got up on the morning heading off to work for another day.

Look at it another way, how would you feel if it was one of your relatives, wife, child or close personal friend that was murdered, would you be screaming for justice or even hoping that it wouldn't happen to others. There are a lot of ifs, buts and maybe's there, if they can get into this persons phone with the strong belief that lives could be saved then I think it justifies the reason as to why they are doing it in the first place.

Another thing to look at, the whole bigger picture is that now that reverse engineering and code breaking etc has been done this could end up out there and used for nefarious purposes by cyber criminals etc. If Apple just gave the required information to the FBI the whole process would not have happened and the possibility of security hacks etc would be kept to a minimum, once again though who says that info won't be leaked anyhow.

[Ttaskmaster]

As I understood it from vaguely skimming the occasional article, the FBI got permission from the court to hack the things. Apple should have then helped, as it was a Law-driven matter. Apple products do tend to be favourites of the liberal hippy Guardian reader types, so their stance will likely bolster sales in that market, but I suspect they'll have lost more from refusing to help protect the nation... especially in a country where protecting the nation is such a big thing.

I personally don't give a tish about the government snooping my data - I have nothing especially criminal to hide, although I'd rather not know who was checking out my Internet history, but that's just what guys do...
I seriously object to anyone else being able to snoop, though, particularly marketing companies and scammers and the like. They are NOT welcome.

[scaryjim]

tbh, the whole thing reeks of a publicity stunt and power grab by the US government. The FBI have had contracts with Cellebrite since 2013/2014, according to most reports; I find it unbelievable that it's taken them months to discover that a company they've been working with for 2 - 3 years have techniques for extracting data from iphones.

This whole thing has played out like an opportunistic grab to make personal communications less secure. Wait for a big, emotive case with potentially critical information stored on a mobile device, then push the device manufacturer to expose that data, knowing that the precedent would then be set for all future incidents and there would be a stronger case for limiting security and encryption on mobile devices. This was never about getting data off one device; that could've been done in a matter of weeks by a company the FBI already had contracts with. It was about changing the political and legal landscape in the US.

[directhex]

tbh, the whole thing reeks of a publicity stunt and power grab by the US government. The FBI have had contracts with Cellebrite since 2013/2014, according to most reports; I find it unbelievable that it's taken them months to discover that a company they've been working with for 2 - 3 years have techniques for extracting data from iphones.

It was a power grab. A technique for getting into pre-5S models running iOS 9 is well known. Not *easy*, but well known. On the 5 and 5C, the number of PIN attmepts is stored on the same NAND chips as the rest of the storage - so you back up the NAND chips, try 5 PINs, then reflash the chips from the backup - repeat up to 2000 times.

This doesn't work for the 5S, 6, 6S, because the security stuff is in the CPU itself - the ability to extract & rewrite that is... orders of magnitude harder

[Ttaskmaster]

This was never about getting data off one device; that could've been done in a matter of weeks by a company the FBI already had contracts with. It was about changing the political and legal landscape in the US.

If my understanding was correct, this was about the FBI getting Apple to sign up to such a thing, or getting the court order overruling Apple and allowing it from a legal standpoint.
Either way, you're possibly right... but I'd have thought they wouldn't need such permission in the first place if it was the ol' "Matter of National Security"... unless those sorts of powers rest with the NSA or something, not the FBI, although I'd again have expected an inter-agency co-operation.

[scaryjim]

... I'd have thought they wouldn't need such permission in the first place if it was the ol' "Matter of National Security"...

Quite. It makes no sense to make this kind of matter public. You want to get the information off the device quietly and quickly so you can act on any incriminating evidence you find, hopefully before the people being incriminated realise you've even got their data.

I can see a number of reasons for drawing this out and making it public that have nothing to do with the information on the phone: a blatant land-grab to try to make federal investigation trump personal privacy; some odd vendetta against Apple in particular, trying to make them look publicly bad for not co-operating (it wouldn't take a genius to work out Apple weren't just going to hand over their secret iphone keys, even if they had them); or possibly my favourite, which is the FBI already knew there was no incriminating information on the phone, but hoped that a lengthy public debate around it followed by suddenly discovering a way to access the data would make someone careless and give them some arrests to trumpet (not that I'm a devious little beggar or anything ). Strategically, in an information war, we may have just witnessed a masterful piece of subterfuge by the FBI. Sadly, I'm cynical enough to assume it was just a power-grab...

[Ttaskmaster]

In that case, I'd ask who made it public in the first place?
Was it the heroic FBI showing up what a threat Apple are to national security by protecting terrorists and criminals... or was it Apple protesting the evil FBI's spying corruption and unearthing the oppression inherrent in the system?

Or was it just some Newsie seeking a big story in an otherwise uneventful day?

[fredsmith999]

Perhaps the FBI, after they discovered there was nothing interesting on it?