Isn't the point that the people operating the software and collecting the evidence are the ones that are supposed to safeguard it against tampering?
Is there any type of evidence that could stand up if we no longer trust the people handling it?
For me, this story isn't about fear that police could leverage the bugs to manipulate a case. It's about the constant fear that laymen rely on unverified "experts" to put people behind bars for years.
I think investigative corruption is a pretty good analogy.
The vulnerability allows any device plugged in to the "kiosk" with a malicious file to do anything it wants to any existing report on the "kiosk" as well as plant code for future execution in order to do anything else it wants.
Let's assume the device which does this does so silently, at what point are the police or Cellebrite supposed to know nothing in the kiosk can be relied on, ever?
With a piece of paper on the other hand, the other sheets in the folder don't suddenly rot when you add a maliciois sheet of paper, although this does sound like an interesting and potentially novel attack vector.
It is not clear from the article that analyzing a phone with malicious files will trigger the issue, unbeknownst to the operator. (E.g. it says "it is possible to execute code that...", etc.) However, I'll take your word for it and assume it was poor reporting in this case.
That does change things, thanks for the clarification.
Clearly we are entering a time of Low Trust Society, and the institutions have only themselves to blame as they have abused the populations trust for decades only now with free flow of information are regular people able to directly see the abuse that has existed for a very very long time.
We used to have a High Trust society, not because the people in power were trust worthy but because the people in power directly controlled the information.
This is no longer the case, and as that power is shifting we are now seeing the people that control information today looking for ways to retain that control and instead of allowing it to flow freely inject their own filters into the streams.
we're returning to a high trust society out of necessity because of economic forces that incentivize information asymmetry.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/09/14/americans-vi...
It's pointless to steal someone's car in a town of 30 families. everyone would know exactly where it went. You also know exactly who you are doing harm to so your sense of sympathy kicks in making you less likely to do it.
These tight knit low population towns seem to naturally create a high-trust honor culture. Small towns have a higher level of social integration so wronging someone creates repercussions that flow back to the perpetrator through every one of their social bonds.
People only pay attention when things are happening at a scale they consider worthy of their attention. The reason corruption is less common at the higher levels is that people are focused on higher level officials; meanwhile, the fact that their local officials are breaking this rule or that rule goes unnoticed, unreported, or worse, happens with everyone's full knowledge and just gets shrugged off.
Also you mention a county tax collector. I wouldn't consider that a tight knit small town. I think there is a lot more corruption at a county level than a small town (from what I've seen).
I sort of get your point about more eyes watching someone the higher they go. Some of it is also the position of those watchers and their opportunities. In many small towns, people know a pot about you and you have plenty of nosy (for lack of a better term) neighbors. Arguably, they make for better watchers.
I would be interested to learn more about this. I have also live in multiple states and this doesn't sound like any of them. Municipalities always have some form of one of the following: mayors, councils, school boards, constables/police, magistrates, etc.
"Is there a reason to view things differently?"
Yeah. I see way more corruption at the county level than the local level. Most of the circumstances and scenarios I laid out in previous comments would not apply to county level officials, nor even to large municipalities. I was strictly speaking about small towns. The most important part is how information is gathered and spread. Small towns are notorious for information being found out and spreading rapidly. That oversight would not be the same in other settings. These mechanisms don't exist at the county level. They are far enough removed from their constituents that they can operate without the same watchful eyes.
Everyone from a small town has a tale of “that family of thieves” who you know to watch when they come in your store. Sometimes they are legit thieves, sometimes it’s just bias.
Some places are higher trust than others but the developed world is based exclusively on a high level of trust. An actual low trust society is so starkly different from what most of us on HN are used: it practically enforces a feudal, subsistence farming society.
Living in the US, I don't remember the last time I had to show my receipt at the fast food counter or show any sort of identification when picking up food that I had paid for online. I've never once paid for a major/emergency medical operation or auto repair ahead of time. Hell, I left the dealership with my last car a full week before they received the check from my bank (in the Seattle area, so definitely not a small town). I don't think anyone has ever really verified my income or finances beyond a cursory credit check and some PDF that could be easily faked by anyone with a little computer literacy. Most mortgages are paid back over thirty years! In my old country, most people don't fully trust that the currency will even last that long.
The systems reinforcing social behavior in larger groups are more complicated and easier to game, but they are definitely still part of a system based on high levels of trust.
The first thing this Celerbrite dudes need to do is to guarantee that the device gets a full reset before each use.
We as society we need to force our police and government to use only open source software, otherwise we don't know what backdoors or shit this guys put in, we could evaluate the code and see if we are wrongfully convicted by a shitty algorithm and transparency would also prevent (hopefully) people selling some open source software with a logo and a python script for milions.
I think it was more insidious. Police scans phone A and stores a log. Police scan phone B with said code on it, which infects the scanner. This code not only tampers with the logs for phone B, but goes back and tampers with the logs for phone A. There is thus no log that one can definitively say represents the true state of any scanned phone at the time it was scanned.
And the evidence logs are written in pencil
I wish we would stop trying to come up with analogies to computing concepts.
But since you insist: this is like the file folder came from Harry Potter and could be possessed by an evil spirit that could change the contents without your knowledge.
Analogies help those people are not familiar with the jargon or the field of study. You may be an expert in the computing concept, but the rest of us are not an expert in that field. Analogies is where it helps to understand it better.
So the answer is no, we can't stop using analogies.
Because that's what this does, it lets the data on a suspect's device potentially cause the software to run arbitrary code with elevated permissions, practically, you could use this to craft a packet of data that, when read by Cellebrite's software, simply shuts off the machine, or kills the Celebrite software, or, worse, connects to the internet and downloads some other payload to do something else. Cause there's no way these machines aren't connected to the internet at some point since the software validates its license that way.
At that point, you cannot trust any of the files in the building.
It's not a matter of operator error. This exploit works during normal operation of the software in question, it depends on the software being operated in a typical fashion.
It's not a choice of the person running the software. The only choice is to stop running the software.
It also calls into question all evidence ever collected by this program because we can't know if some other company already figured this out or not.
The crazy thing about this attack, is the person making the copy may never know until its presented in court and challenged. Then everything from the folder has to be thrown out.
Turns out that's actually a real thing...
https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...