Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

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It's funny to me that Apple and the FBI coordinated to spin the whole iPhone decryption thing in the media after the San Bernardino shooting as Apple vs FBI (while in reality the FBI had all the access to all the data they wanted, via iCloud, via an encryption backdoor that Apple explicitly preserved for them).

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-exclusiv...

Now Apple no doubt would love to do some RE on these devices to identify and patch any exploits they use, and many of the local PDs that can get Cellebrite to sell them these boxes probably will abide by these terms, having previously been convinced via Apple/FBI propaganda that Apple is opposed to cooperating with law enforcement.

It's a little bit funny, but I think Apple security will win out in the long run as it only takes one instance of a leak for Apple to patch a vulnerability, and they do have a lot of money (and the cooperation of the FBI/DHS et al). The text of the training quoted in the article makes it seem that Cellebrite knows they are fighting an ultimately losing battle there, as information never becomes more secret over time, only less so.

IIRC that's not how any of it went down. The authorities wanted access to the device itself and were asking for a "good guys only" backdoor into the device to obtain anything that might not have been in the iCloud backup; Apple refused to do this and that is where the controversy / news story came from.

Apple was very open about the fact that law enforcement would have access to the iCloud backup, which is even mentioned in the article you provided. And there was no "backdoor explicitly preserved" for the FBI, the iCloud backup was just not e2ee. This was also (somewhat) common knowledge at the time and what was often suggested was to do backups through iTunes because there was still an option available to encrypt the backup.

Cellebrite keeps the good stuff on their premises. You send the phone to them and they crack it for you.

So all apple needs to do is enable a gps that destroys the Secure Enclave if it detects that it is on a cellebrite campus.

LEOs already use faraday bags and cages for devices they confiscate to prevent remote wipes. Some of the products even include chargers to ensure devices don't go dark (searching for signal eats up battery life, after all) and flush valuable data from memory. How could Apple rely on GPS when the device will be totally offline?

https://www.teeltech.com/mobile-device-forensics-equipment/m...

https://tritechforensics.com/digital-forensics/df-faraday-pr...

https://arrowheadforensics.com/products/evidence-packaging/f...

Sounds like a feature that wipes the phone if it loses signal for X minutes could be useful.

I would think a more reliable method would be heuristics to detect tampering which triggers enclave destruction when confidence level is high or the activity continues long enough. There are exceptions but the actions that enable deeper exploits rarely resemble normal usage in any way and should be simple to differentiate.

I’m sure Cellebrite never buys new real estate.

You don't believe Apple would find out about them? They could know before the lease is signed.

Where would they put the code to do this? How would it function if Cellebrite put devices in a Faraday cage before transport?

Indeed you can’t rely on GPS. But…the absence of GPS for more than a few hours is pretty weird. An automatic reboot and maybe nuke could be appropriate for some users. I guess then the faraday cage also needs a fake gps signal to defeat this.

If you have the power budget than you can compare accelerometer data to check validity of the GPS, dead reconing-style.

Ooo great point

Apple also has their tracking network. Airtags + every Apple device

Probably not useful if you’re in a faraday cage.

except apple now has e2ee for iCloud, and apple still doesnt want others to get into their firmware and secure enclaves

The fact that we have to call it "their firmware and secure enclaves" is a bit telling, though. The majority of consumer-facing devices today have a layer of inscrutability that we leave up to the manufacturer to implement properly. For instance, Microsoft has Bitlocker, but I couldn't confidently say that isn't backdoored either.

Apple has whitepapers, but they're about as verifiable as LK-99 in-practice. Their security model entirely revolves around the Apple-issued root of trust, and if you can't trust them then you have to hit the bricks. If you don't own both ends, the end-to-end encryption shtick is a theatrical farce.

If Bitlocker had a backdoor it would have leaked by now. I don't believe that they could keep an "alphabet boys only" backdoor secret for that long.

How would that backdoor even look like? A some sort of master key that can decrypt every Bitlocker encrypted drive? Imagine if something like THAT got leaked.

Who would have access to that key? Microsoft themselves? NSA? FBI? What about the UK, Australia or other US allies? Do their alphabet boys also get access to this?

Do small town cops also get access?

And I'm pretty sure lots of security researchers have tried to find vulnerabilities of Bitlocker. If there was something fishy going on - they would have noticed.

It can potentially be a theatrical farce, but you've only created hypothetical scenarios in your mind for why that might be the case. Even if you did "own both ends", you still have to rely on other parties to contribute the pieces that you don't watch over, unless you're going to be E2EE from scratch (again, because you can hypothetically just say "well what if the encryption scheme itself is backdoored").

Both of those conceits apply to Apple's scheme as well, though. Transparency enforces accountability, Apple themselves wouldn't be using things like OpenSSL and bash if they weren't open enough to scrutinize and modify.

sure, all clouds are other people’s computers; laypeople just want things to work and don’t really care about whose root of trust they use.

living in a world where you run everything yourself sounds good in practice but then you can’t communicate with anyone else.

i’d like for the firmware to be open source and for the cloud to be federated, but it’s a pipe dream and i’m busy so i just gotta trust apple in the end

e2ee for iCloud is opt in (ie disabled by default) so approximately 0% of iCloud users use it.

Until it's on by default for new iCloud accounts and previous non-e2ee iCloud accounts get automatically upgraded to use it, the fact that it is offered is basically irrelevant.

Additionally if you are using it to protect your iMessages, it's ineffective, as your iMessages are stored on Apple servers twice: once for each end of the conversation. Unless both you and the other end of your conversation have both explicitly opted in to e2ee for iCloud, a single party enabling the setting does nothing for the security of iMessage, given that approximately nobody uses the feature today.

If you’re that paranoid, maybe don’t send super sensitive information using a chat application.

This has nothing to do with "paranoid", or with me personally. I don't use iMessage at all.

I also didn't live in Nazi Germany under the SS and Gestapo but I can still recognize and identify that police surveillance over the private communications of all (or even a significant fraction of all) members of society silently and discreetly creates a world which sucks for everyone in it, as things like new political parties or new labor unions (or any other threat to the status quo) will be detected and defeated before they ever gain popular attention or critical mass.

Did we already forget OWS and the tea party? How about MLK?

Please stop using defined psychological disease terms to describe people who seek basic human rights to privacy from corporations and the state. It's disrespectful to both people who suffer from paranoid delusions as well as sane people who desire human rights.

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