Police believe Grayshift has a workaround for Apple’s new USB Restricted Mode | Hacker News Reader

Police believe Grayshift has a workaround for Apple’s new USB Restricted Mode

motherboard.vice.com

25 pointsrobin_reala11 comments

Why doesn't Apple dig deep into their warchest and either acquire Grayshift, or pay off one of their engineers to spill the beans?

I'm really curious how one goes about "future proofing" an external cable connecting to a device via a usb port gated from inside of the device. Voltage? Frequency? Fantasy?

For better or for worse, articles like this and the leaking of information from Grayshift gives Apple a lot of smoke to follow. If you’re trying to figure out how an attacker is getting into a system and you’ve cut off one major vector, that’s good. But if the attacker then comes out and says that they’re unaffected by that vector cutoff, it signals that was the wrong vector to block off.

It’s an interesting cat and mouse game, but I have a feeling that the cat will win. Apple can “go nuclear” and do something like remove wired data connectivity all together, for example. Low level boot firmware doesn’t need to change all that often — getting it “right” means that they won’t need to worry about it for a long time.

Apple loves showing off their investment to privacy as of late. It’s very tempting from Apple’s perspective to invest a lot of time and money in keeping attackers out now, more than ever.

How is it not DMCA violation?

Our justice system is just not well-designed to hold police to account.

There's no neutral, separate prosecutor to bring charges against the police. Instead, it's on District Attorneys and regular prosecutors--the same offices that bring charges against citizens and work with police witnesses every day of the year. Incentives are misaligned. Prosecutors, for the most part, are strikingly reluctant to pursue legal action against fellow law enforcement. They are nearly coworkers, in the sense that they see each other often and rely on each other to accomplish their day to day jobs.

Local police are rarely prosecuted and even more rarely convicted even in serious cases, like officer-involved shootings: https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/18/us/police-involved-shooting-c...

The chance that federal police will see consequences for breaking copyright law looks slim.

Two reasons I see:

1) Nobody guards the guards

2) Being anywhere in the process of enforcing the DMCA on law enforcement will end your career (well, maybe with the exception of the secretary and the janitor). You can only cross the blue line once.

Grayshift isn't law enforcement though, they're a private company that is creating DMCA violating products. Apple has every right to sue them, and hopefully recover some compensation for how they have sullied Apple's brand.

As much as I hate the DMCA, I think this is the perfect suit with only upside:

1. Apple loses. DMCA is weakened for legitimate security research. Yay

2. Apple wins. My security in my person and belongings is strengthened against unlawful interference. Yay

Wouldn't scenario 2 potentially strengthen DMCA and make it more difficult to do legitimate security research in the future? That's quite a big downside.

Yes, but the obvious bounce back would be amendments called for by police to the law. Which puts us back in scenario 1

3. The world is a big place and flaws are exposed in other countries.

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