DOJ says iPhone is so secure they can’t crack it

  • mfreeman451
    Posts: 543
    August 13, 2012 at 6:21 pm #1278513

    “In the five years since Apple (AAPL) launched the iPhone, the popular device has gone from a malicious hacker’s dream to law enforcement’s worst nightmare. As recounted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Technology Review blog, a Justice Department official recently took the stage at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C. and told attendees that the beefed up security in iOS is now so good that it has become a nightmare for law enforcement.

    “I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab for the CCIPS division of the Department of Justice, said earlier this month during his presentation at DFRWS. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”

    While Apple’s use of sophisticated cryptography is the biggest obstacle law enforcement and hackers face, Technology Review points out that it’s not the only one. Apple’s requirement that apps are “sandboxed,” or isolated from protected parts of the OS, eliminated a wide range of exploits that were possible with earlier versions of iOS. Even the iPhone’s more secure PIN code protection poses a serious barrier for those looking to gain access to an iPhone.

    “There are a lot of issues when it comes to extracting data from iOS devices,” Amber Schroader, CEO of forensic software developer Paraben, told Technology Review. “We have had many civil cases we have not been able to process … for discovery because of encryption blocking us.””

    http://apple.slashdot.org/story/12/08/13/165244/doj-says-iphone-is-so-secure-they-cant-crack-it

    AllenW
    Mpls, MN
    Posts: 2895
    August 13, 2012 at 6:27 pm #1091875

    Could be, but I’m betting some 16 year old computer geek is sitting in his mom’s basement going…”Oh Ya?”

    Al

    suzuki
    Woodbury, Mn
    Posts: 18615
    August 13, 2012 at 6:52 pm #1091885

    Sounds kinda good to me. It would be nice if electronic documents were as secure as the paper documents you kept in your wallet.

    mfreeman451
    Posts: 543
    August 13, 2012 at 6:53 pm #1091886

    What is worse, losing an encrypted file, or losing your entire wallet?

    desperado
    Posts: 3010
    August 13, 2012 at 8:54 pm #1091919

    GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN

    iowaeye
    Posts: 160
    August 13, 2012 at 9:09 pm #1091922

    What a stupid proclamation. I can only imagine how many people with the know how saw this and said “challenge accepted!”

    mfreeman451
    Posts: 543
    August 13, 2012 at 9:44 pm #1091907

    Put your tinfoil hat back on if you think cryptography approved by the NSA to secure top-secret level information is going to be cracked by someone because of this article.

    “Until May 2009, the only successful published attacks against the full AES were side-channel attacks on some specific implementations. The National Security Agency (NSA) reviewed all the AES finalists, including Rijndael, and stated that all of them were secure enough for U.S. Government non-classified data. In June 2003, the U.S. Government announced that AES could be used to protect classified information:”

    http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/ST/toolkit/documents/aes/CNSS15FS.pdf

    Quote:

    What a stupid proclamation. I can only imagine how many people with the know how saw this and said “challenge accepted!”

    big_g
    Isle, MN
    Posts: 22450
    August 13, 2012 at 11:35 pm #1091934

    Wow, you still tore up about the PC and Mac thread from last week ?

    mfreeman451
    Posts: 543
    August 14, 2012 at 2:32 am #1091971

    You mean the one where you once again contributed absolutely nothing of value to?

    quote]Wow, you still tore up about the PC and Mac thread from last week ?

    hnd
    Posts: 1579
    August 14, 2012 at 2:56 am #1091976

    plus it leads the market in fart sound apps!

    big_g
    Isle, MN
    Posts: 22450
    August 14, 2012 at 9:49 pm #1092108

    Quote:

    You mean the one where you once again contributed absolutely nothing of value to?

    quote]Wow, you still tore up about the PC and Mac thread from last week ?

    Yeah, that one big spender…. Alot of value in your copy and pastes at least my posts were MY words.

    rvvrrat
    The Sand Prairie
    Posts: 1840
    August 15, 2012 at 2:10 am #1092180

    Dogma is what it is. If you read the comments in the link you might find stuff like this:

    “It was a higher-up in the DoJ (specifically, Ovie Carroll) discussing challenges in digital forensics (at a conference on digital forensics). It was a brief mention in a larger talk and a fact that does not surprise anyone in the field. It’s well-known that pulling data off of an iPhone can be a real pain in the [censored]. (IMO, I would consider Android worse, as there is not yet a reliable technique that can pull data off of an unrooted

    phone without modifying the phone’s data, and data modification — even when justified and documented — is a big problem in some jurisdictions.)”

    Big G…my apologies for the cut and paste.

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