We will soon figure out if the now-cracked phone was worthy of the efforts. If they capture more bad guys it will probably have been worth it and the FBI will toot their own horn. Silence means that it was a failed expedition.
Unless the "bad guys" are related directly to this and this is shown in court, I doubt it; don't expect anything. This was one big show.
It seems like Tim Cook should pursue a contract with Cellebrite to help Apple make their iPhones more secure. Make it a $2 million USD contract and drop the FBI as customer.
APPL could just buy Sun Corp, Cellebrite, pachinko games and all for less than $250M. Could help tighten up iPhone security and they'd know how the 5c was opened (if they even actually opened it). That's what, 1/10 of 1% of what they're sitting on overseas?
It seems like Tim Cook should pursue a contract with Cellebrite to help Apple make their iPhones more secure. Make it a $2 million USD contract and drop the FBI as customer.
APPL could just buy Sun Corp, Cellebrite, pachinko games and all for less than $250M. Could help tighten up iPhone security and they'd know how the 5c was opened (if they even actually opened it). That's what, 1/10 of 1% of what they're sitting on overseas?
With Cellebrite being a multinational subsidiary to Sun Corp, it makes sense to keep this knowledge tightly controlled from government access and to use its vast capability in mobile forensics to improve their products. Apple has acquired a number of companies over the years and this would probably be one of the most logical ones.
Even after all that we still do not know what was in the phone that was not already available through metadata collection. I don't think the FBI will publicize their findings. We keep paying the bill for our government to keep secrets from us and we keep funding ineffective counter terrorism peograms.
At the machine code level no computing device is immune to reverse engineering. Once you have the processor in hand you can make it run as you want. I don't think any exploit or zero-day vulnerability is used here, nor Apple keys are compromised. What is inaccessible is the data, not the runtime. The runtime is always open. They had to find the user's passcode to access the data, but the runtime was preventing them to do brute force. You just rewrite that part of the operating system to remove that obstacle... During the late 80s and early 90s, the computing media were full of machine code to do similar tweaks, to manipulate processor registers to make it run step by step etc... but that culture has disappeared in the mainstream media, so that affair appears to a layman as a very mysterious deep conspiracy. This is just routine electronic engineering...
I don't get it. They would have used a chip rewrite method and brute forced the password until they got it right. Once they had the code to get into the phone, why would they have to break into the phone again? Or are the FBI incapable of inputting a 4 digit number? Every time they unlock this phone, are we going to hear about it? Or is it like when a band releases a single and it doesn't do well so they rerelease it later on? Maybe not enough people bought the story so they rereleased it hoping that some more people believe it.
I don't get it. They would have used a chip rewrite method and brute forced the password until they got it right. Once they had the code to get into the phone, why would they have to break into the phone again? Or are the FBI incapable of inputting a 4 digit number? Every time they unlock this phone, are we going to hear about it? Or is it like when a band releases a single and it doesn't do well so they rerelease it later on? Maybe not enough people bought the story so they rereleased it hoping that some more people believe it.
In all likelihood, they did a tethered jailbreak and somehow reset the pin code in the process. Tethered jailbreaks rely on a certain level of trust, and personally I have limited concern on this approach at the system level, but hope the secure enclave protects data still in more modern phones.
Comments
This was one big show.
Apple would then use Cellebrite's talent to find security weaknesses in iOS devices etc.
I don't get it. They would have used a chip rewrite method and brute forced the password until they got it right. Once they had the code to get into the phone, why would they have to break into the phone again? Or are the FBI incapable of inputting a 4 digit number? Every time they unlock this phone, are we going to hear about it?
Or is it like when a band releases a single and it doesn't do well so they rerelease it later on? Maybe not enough people bought the story so they rereleased it hoping that some more people believe it.