IPhone vulnerability leaves your data wide open, even when using a PIN | Hacker News Reader

IPhone vulnerability leaves your data wide open, even when using a PIN

engadget.com

14 pointsiamelgringo18 comments

Can't you hack just about any computer given physical access and being able to plug another computer into it?

Uh huh. Because the other phones on the market? When you plug them into a USB port? Impregnable.

Justifying your shortcomings "because everyone else has them" is a recipe for failure, and doesn't get rid of the fact that there's a shortcoming. In this case, a rather significant one.

That's besides the point. I'm not justifying anyone. I'm saying the article is presenting a false choice, between a phone with a known physical security issue and a fictitious phone without one, and claiming that choice should influence enterprise buying.

Right. It's like they're insinuating that there's some mythical smartphone with an HSM FIPS 140-2 L4 compatible crypto chip. Face it, if someone wants the data on your smartphone they can get it.

Like blackberries? http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/STM/cmvp/documents/140-1/1401val...

edit: I'm no expert and read too quickly the level 4 you mentioned, but at least isn't overall level 1 better than iphone's overall level 0?

Not especially. If memory isn't tamper proof and you get a hold of a phone that's on (very likely) then you can just dump the RAM and scour for the encryption key.

@winthrow

Overall Level: 1

Edit: To those who downvote, please read up on the full FIPS 140-2 specification. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_140-2

Did anybody think the data was encrypted? Does anybody think a four digit pin is a sufficient key for encryption?

Sure, here's one way to do it. The PIN is handled by hardware, which sends a longer decryption key (128 bit, say?) to encrypted disk hardware, then yes. You'd have to disable the 4 digit PIN decryption if more than 15 or so attempts in a row fail. (But perhaps have a much longer passphrase for recovery.)

With this scheme, the data is protected by a 128 bit symmetric cipher key. There is a small chance that the PIN could be guessed by luck (0.15%) but this is much better than nothing.

For the most part, I wouldn't trust encrypted disk hardware. The relevant standard for this sort of thing is NIST FIPS 140-2.

Edit: You'd have to disable the 4 digit PIN decryption if more than 15 or so attempts in a row fail.

On second thought, there are numerous ways this could be vulnerable to a side-channel attack.

It would still make it more difficult than plugging the device into a Linux box.

Would the side channel attack work if you only had access to one particular iPad on one occasion?

EDIT: One side channel that would be nasty - the greasy fingerprints on the keypad! (Perhaps the keypad could move to random locations?)

Even if the keys are 128 bits long, if there's only 10000 of them, it doesn't do much good.

Please work on reading comprehension. You'd only be able to try 15 of them. That gives you a 0.15% chance of guessing. That's far bigger than 15/(2^128), but I wasn't proposing an optimized system.

From the standpoint of industrial espionage operation, a 0.15% chance of success is pretty dismal. This is only good for the standpoint of protecting a particular device. If there is a secret that absolutely must be protected on every single device, I think that the company's security has much bigger problems than iPhone PINs.

Apple, please don't encrypt stuff on my iPhone. It's hard enough to copy music to/from it from my Linux machine as it is.

The software to do this has been available for a long time now. iTunes requires devices to be unlocked via a passcode to perform a sync, but that's a courtesy--the AFC service running on the device allows full access to the user partition from the USB interface without restriction.

just imagine what kind of access you'd get if you plugged it into a mac? and PS. does this mean you can sync music to an iphone in linux? if so, cool!

AFAIK, you get no access other than through iTunes. The iPhone storage volume doesn't mount in OS X the way regular USB drives do. If anyone knows something different, enlighten me (I'd love to use it as a portable HD)

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