Hacker News Reader

Comment by ziddoap | Hacker News Reader

>They and I know they can't side step lawful requests which raises the spidey senses even further so I believe it is a valid question.

They have been able to turn down lawful requests previously, which is (at the very least) a positive indicator that may lower your spidey senses a bit.

>On April 18 at least six police officers from the National Operations Department (NOA) of the Swedish Police visited the Mullvad VPN office in Gothenburg with a search warrant.

>After demonstrating that this is indeed how our service works and them consulting the prosecutor they left without taking anything and without any customer information.

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2023/4/20/mullvad-vpn-was-subjec...

View on HN

I remember that and that case was cool. I will leave my questions in place though because I recall Apple doing the same thing when a terrorist phone was locked and they claimed to not be able to access with a big public show/fight it but turns out they could and so could the FBI. My theory is that they did not want the public to lose confidence in their phones.

Yeah, that Apple case was really interesting. I always guessed that Apple could simply push a software update (possibly to everyone) that happens to open a backdoor for a specific phone. I wonder if that's what they did.

What happened in that case is the FBI went to a different vendor, and they broke into the iPhone either with a zero day they had developed or more likely, they just cloned the phone hardware thousands of times until they could guess the password.

Yep, Apple had nothing to do with it. They do hand over iCloud data (which now can be E2E)

Maybe - depends on how secure enclave is built. It may have hardware defined limitations on # of tries for the passkey and no way to circumvent that in firmware even.

Apple would've had to create a specific OS update with a security hole the FBI could've exploited and distributed that.

Courts couldn't force them to do that -> FBI went another way. This was in the iPhone 7 era IIRC.

Currently their stuff is locked down even tighter and Apple has even less ability to hack anyone's phone. Barring a full-on backdoored software update targeted to a specific person - which they refused to do once already.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com