Thread

Cops Can Bypass iPhone's Automatic Reboot to Get into Locked Phones

287 points · 226 comments · speckx

Melatonic · 1790869933 · focus · HN ↗
I wouldnt be surprised if they had a backdoor into the Qualcomm chip that Apple decided to oddly still include in most of their US iPhones vs the international versions that come with their own internal modem
1. bigyabai · 1790876172 · focus · HN ↗
  I wouldn't be surprised if they had a backdoor into the Secure Enclave. Apple is definitely a part of the US' NOBUS scheming, whether or not cops get to use it.
  1. eli · 1790878782 · focus · HN ↗
    So the FBI publicly fueding with Apple over encryption is all just misdirection? I dunno about that
    bigyabai · 1790878857 · focus · HN ↗
    The "feud" happened only a year after the Snowden leaks revealed Apple's cooperation with the FBI.
    Both of them needed a PR win, and San Bernardino gave both sides exactly what they wanted. If it wasn't collusion, it was certainly convenient for Apple and the FBI both.
    monster_truck · 1790879755 · focus · HN ↗
    More a matter of who has what when. The FBI is ass and anyone there I would have vouched for retired a bit before 2016.
    That aside, it doesn't change their extensive history of ensnaring and enabling mentally deficient young men to incriminate themselves.
    You could attempt to argue that anyone they can do that to is inherently a risk or threat because any other group could have done the same, but at the same time this approach broke containment and is being directed at a markedly more pale demographic, ie <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Base_(neo-Nazi_group)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Base_(neo-Nazi_group), with seemingly no counterplay
  2. monster_truck · 1790879271 · focus · HN ↗
    The past few weeks of people ripping into it have demonstrated that SE is mostly reality distortion and does not offer any unique or meaningful protection. I have no doubt the old modems had deficiencies, the new ones assuredly do too. Just a changing of the guard for however long it lasts.
    I wouldn't call it scheming though. The approach of choice to (scare quotes) ensuring continued access has traditionally been one where there is no overt coordination or communication. The ideal case is one where every engineer, pm, qa, leadership earnestly believe that they have done a good job/the correct thing... and then there is some deficiency that handily bypasses all of that, exposed publicly, without any authentication and a convenient lack of logging, or some oversight in the specification/standard everything operates against. Real world examples of this include backends to vehicle telemetry/connectivity apps that hand over complete driving histories with the right ip, json and a vin, or flock somehow deploying ~nationwide with a static password and no append only logging in each device. They're flagrant violations of best practices, without conseqeuences or liability.
    That's one of the more incredible things about LLMs, the rate at which they are finding these needles in haystacks is only going to accelerate. It's the end of an era. These things were never used for what they should have been, I struggle to imagine a legitimate argument in favor for them that isn't carrying water for the wrong team.
    saagarjha · 1790900078 · focus · HN ↗
    > The past few weeks of people ripping into it have demonstrated that SE is mostly reality distortion and does not offer any unique or meaningful protection.
    Link?
2. clueless · 1790878454 · focus · HN ↗
  that Qualcomm chip that apple uses is a modem, so not sure it's that relevant to the phone's security in this case...
  1. saagarjha · 1790900040 · focus · HN ↗
    Modems have been used to exploit the AP (but I don’t necessarily agree that it’s a backdoor here).
3. canada_dry · 1790881382 · focus · HN ↗
  This extremely well hidden backdoor was an interesting find:
  <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783112

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