Apple Just Killed The 'GrayKey' iPhone Passcode Hack
forbes.com
forbes.com
>Apple Just Killed...
iOS 12 was released weeks ago, so the exploit wasn't just killed as the title says.
>Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
> With iOS 12, Apple implemented a highly-anticipated change called “USB Restricted Mode.” This shuts off lightning port access on the iPhone if it hasn’t been unlocked by a user in the last hour. This was widely believed to be Apple’s solution to foil companies like GrayShift and Cellebrite but we don’t know for certain if that did the trick. Apple did not return our request for comment.
That would definitely do it. If Lightning goes down they cannot differentially backup/restore while attempting to guess the user's passcode.
A friend dropped a drink through his and it looked very dead. Turns out with a thunderbolt cable, another Mac, and his disk crypto password & he had easy access so his old disk. Don’t ask me how, but kudos Apple.
No clue how you'd do that with the newer ones (dongles?) or with a dysfunctional keyboard though...
Isn't that kind of like asking "How do you put your seat belt on after you've been knocked unconscious in a car accident?"
This isn't always possible, but if the storage is undamaged, it would be ideal from a continuity perspective.
Source?
We get iPhone repairs out of Apple very often - If we mention it's urgent they'll swap it for a refurb, which is a good thing: It's allowed me to be in-and-out in 15 minutes versus dropping an iPhone off and picking it up the next day.
We have a business account - I've not broken my personal iPhone in years so I can't speak as a consumer. I did have a MacBook Pro 15" keyboard (pre-butterfly) fail WAY out of warranty and they replaced that for free too. Maybe I'm lucky, or maybe Apple aren't so bad to deal with after all?
Except for the fact they do ? https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service
How is it possible for someone to start a business built on breaking the security systems they had a role in implementing? It seems like a huge ethical breach, and I'm surprised there would not be contractual considerations to prevent this in the security field.
Really the only problem I can think of is if you put backdoors or weaknesses into the system with the expectation of being hired later to defeat the same system. But the problem there is the fact that you deliberately crippled the system you were building and not the fact that you were hired later to defeat it.
It's like if you have a key to an apartment and you move out without the landlord asking for it back. It's not unethical if you then discover that the key still works. It becomes unethical when you do not disclose this fact. Worse still if you start making copies of the key and selling it to people who intend to break into that apartment.
If this person knew of a flaw when at Apple, and did not disclose it to Apple (his employer), but instead left to go exploit it--that would be clearly unethical and possibly even illegal.
But if they left, and then, as an ex-employee of Apple, discovered a new flaw in Apple's security... how are they any different from a random person who never worked at Apple?
Do security researchers have a general ethical obligation to disclose a product's security flaws to the company who created it? I think most security researchers would say no... the obligation is more rightly put on the company itself to produce secure products.
Company managers don't generally have an ethical obligation to their ex-employees after the employment period ends. It doesn't seem fair to say that ex-employees should be obligated toward their former employer. The exception would be if they acted unethically while employed there and then reaped the benefits later.
Or look at it this way--imagine an employee of GrayKey went to Apple, and then learned how Apple is defeating GrayKey. Does that employee have an ethical obligation to tell GrayKey about that? If ethics don't work the same in both directions, they're probably not strong ethics.
That is, unless there is some higher moral at stake, like "breaking security is always wrong." But even that is problematic because if you never try to break security, it never gets better.
They are still different from the average person on the street. Security is more than just the binary flaw/no flaw distinction. Perhaps while working at Apple the researcher knew about some old libraries that were still in production release but had not been worked on, let alone updated in years? That sort of insider knowledge could help them find exploits the average person wouldn't think of.
GrayKey is a completely unethical company. They are selling unauthorized access to people's devices. The fact that their main clients are law enforcement officers is irrelevant.
I can't believe you'd suggest that Apple is in the wrong for hindering GrayKey's efforts. Am I in the wrong for changing the locks on my door to hinder burglars?
Security flaws are ticking time bombs that threaten all of society. Discovering them and exploiting them rather than helping to fix them is ethically akin to discovering chemical or biological weapons and helping to put them into use.
I'd say this is an example of a higher ethic or moral at stake. Not everyone agrees with you that law enforcement access to a device is always unethical. It certainly can be, if the police are acting unethically (which some do). But if they are properly investigating a crime and get a warrant, that's going to cross into the OK zone for a lot of people.
> I can't believe you'd suggest that Apple is in the wrong for hindering GrayKey's efforts.
I did not suggest that and I don't believe that. I think it's great that Apple is fixing their device security.
Not for me. There's nothing sacred about the police. They spend a heck of a lot of time and effort acting as foot soldiers in a class war against the impoverished. They engage in widespread legalized highway robbery in the form of civil forfeiture. And if you want to include customs and border patrol (I do) they also spend a ton of time breaking up desperate families and conducting dragnet surveillance against innocent travellers. And their effectiveness in all these endeavours? Abysmal, if you take their stated aims at face value.
In the landlord example my argument is that the landlord is being unethical, locks should be changed.
One of the guiding principles of ethics I follow is Kant's "ought implies can" [1]. If you make a mistake and forget to do something, that's not the same as deliberately choosing not to do it. All humans make mistakes of this kind. To imply otherwise is to imply that a person could rise above all of humanity. That is asking far too much.
The only ethical breach I see here would be if they deliberately weakened the system so that they could break it later, which seems unlikely.
Then leave Apple and join another company and proceed to 'rediscover' it.
As I said in a sibling comment, it's a constantly ongoing cat-and-mouse game.
Any sufficiently popular "thing to crack" is doomed in the long run. ... They are just training offences.
Actually it's not.
>Any sufficiently popular "thing to crack" is doomed in the long run. ... They are just training offences.
No, because these are not symmetric operations. There is nothing mathematically impossible about bug free software. While the Halting Problem means that we can't just formally take any arbitrary program and solve all its states, it is possible to formally prove small programs and additively build up, and to approach a limit of zero with enough brute force over time particularly in simple programs. If they are not changing and actively gaining new informal features then they will not be automatically gaining new vulnerabilities either, and for all these very reasons it's standard practice to try to separate security core code and make it as simple and static as possible beyond bug fixes.
So unlike the real world in software defense is actually in a naturally stronger position if managed well. Software history is a spiral not a circle, security practices are improving and legacy is being reduced over time. A lot of easy mistakes of the past don't happen so much or at all anymore, and Apple has definitely benefitted long term from the hunt for exploits in hardening their ecosystem. Bugs still exist, but they're not low hanging fruit anymore, they're harder to find and more restricted in scope and more must be chained together for wider access.
To me this is like saying there’s nothing mathematically impossible about a perfect vacuum. There’s always something leaking energy/attack surface.
I would love to see some leaked screenshots of even just the main page after login.
I've been wondering about that since Snowden afforded us a glimpse into the internal PowerPoint world of the NSA. That stuff - all of it - looked just like I would have designed presentations around 1996. When I first discovered PowerPoint. As a kid.
Does the description change as you flip the toggle? Otherwise it certainly seems the like description implies it should be ON in order to achieve that behavior, not OFF.
But in any case, from the screenshot it seemed confusing but with the full description of the UI it sounds like they got it as right as a cryptic security setting buried 3 menus deep could ever be.