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Comment by DagAgren | Hacker News Reader

Physical access does not at all need to mean that the game is over, with today's architectures.

With an iPhone, any storage you can access with physical access is going to be encrypted. The encryption key lives in the secure enclave, which you do not have access to even with physical access, barring drastic measure like trying to take chips apart and scanning their contents, which may or may not be feasible at all.

What still may be possible is bugs and exploits, but that's up to whether you are lucky enough to have one that works against a particular phone and firmware.

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I dont believe this explanation. Not because it comes from you. I never believed it. "Secure enclave", yeah. sure. My point is, if you have sensitive data that you dont want to loose, you should probably not carry it around with you all day. Apple is trying to convince us that they have invented a sort of security that hasn't existed before. They claim they have invented a piece of paper that nobody else can read. This claim is so old, and has never been true.

If I wanted to hide an important piece of information, I guess I'd find a physically obscure and secured playce, like a hidden safe or whatnot. But I wouldn't trust crypto, no matter if the key were placed in a "secure enclave" (haha), or not.

It's not possible to generate a computer system that will remain secure for the rest of time. All encryption can be decrypted.

Every phone ever sold can have its internal data read, it's not a case of if but when. This also applies to every HDD, SDD and any encryption software you may be using, it will be cracked eventually.

How do you read data inside the secure enclave, then?

Disassemble the chip, and use scanning electron microscopes.

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/cardis2016_sem.pdf

Sure. That is incredibly expensive and time-consuming, and due to anti-tampering protections has a high possibility of destroying the data before it can be extracted.

So, not realistically viable in 99.99% of attack scenarios.

No, Apple is using known technology that has existed for quite a while now. Secure enclaves aren't new or mysterious, they are established technology.

A piece of paper no-one can read is extremely doable, if you encrypt your HDD at home you can walk around with it as long as you like and no-one will decrypt it, the problem is making it an accessible device you can comfortably use and take data in and out of without accidentally making it readable.

I don’t think Apple are claiming to have invented security that didn’t exist before.

The idea of a Secure Enclave has existed for years in the form of Chip-and-PIN bank cards. Before that HSMs are built on the same principle (a bank card I just a tiny HSM).

Of this works on the principle that it’s very hard to reverse engineer silicon, and that you can make it harder by creating silicon designs that deliberately obfuscate their purpose.

End result is a piece of hardware that very difficult to take apart with irreversible damaging it, and destroying the data in the process. The attack itself would also require an extremely high level of skill.

Ultimately no security is perfect, it’s not meant to be. Security is just meant to skew the effort-reward equation enough that no one can be bothered to break into your thing.

> This claim is so old, and has never been true.

Citation needed.

> If I wanted to hide an important piece of information, I guess I'd find a physically obscure and secured playce [sic], like a hidden safe or whatnot.

That's just basic threat assessment. Obviously if you have a chunk of data that's really sensitive, it would be best to "air gap" it from the internet.

> But I wouldn't trust crypto, no matter if the key were placed in a "secure enclave" (haha), or not.

Please review Apple's "Apple Platform Security" document before continuing to comment. [1]

[1] https://manuals.info.apple.com/MANUALS/1000/MA1902/en_US/app...

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