Feds Beg Supreme Court to Let Them Search Phones Without a Warrant
wired.com
wired.com
If you're arrested by the police, they will not generally need to obtain a warrant to search your person, your pockets, your bag, or the passenger compartment of your car. Thoroughly.
People confuse "search incident to arrest" with "Terry stops", which are light, supposedly unintrusive searches that can be conducted without individualized suspicion for purposes of officer safety (ie, for weapons). Terry stops are the ones where, supposedly, the police aren't supposed to be reaching into your pocket. Search incident to arrest, going back over 100 years, has always had a purpose of discovering and preserving evidence; they aren't simply about officer safety.
That said: a modern smart phone is more than just a container you carry on your person. It can provide access to much of the same personal information that a search of your most personal possessions would. It's a totally reasonable question as to whether an intrusive search of the data on a smartphone falls into the rubrick of what search incident to arrest was meant to cover.
Either way: make sure your phone is encrypted.
Apple can turn off the "try ten times and erase phone" feature, but it still can't brute force faster than ~8 tries per second on a 5S. You might also want to turn off the "apple key escrow" feature.
Yes you can. You image the phone and brute force in parallel.
Edit: thanks for letting me know this information is wrong!
The encryption key, just some random 256-bits, is protected by the rate-limited HSM, which can be unlocked by the passcode. Imaging the flash of another phone with the ciphertext is futile, because that other phone has neither the same key or passcode hash in it's HSM. A different HSM wouldn't be able to decrypt the ciphertext even given the correct passcode.
The whole point of the HSM is that pulling the key or the passcode hash out of it should be quite difficult... certainly not as easy as imaging the phone!
A)The encryption key burned into the chip's internal HSM
B)A randomly generated encryption key in effaceable storage
C)The user's passcode
Each passcode attempt is protected by 250,000 rounds of some key stretching function (can't remember what exactly) using the device's internal crypto acceleration hardware.
To successfully parallelize an attack on an iPhone's passcode, you would have to A) get the key out of effaceable storage (can probably be done with a root 0day) and B) extract the HSM's burned-in crypto key (would require a decapping or maybe differential power analysis).
And even then, you're still stuck with a few hundred thousand rounds of hashing per try, which is pretty brutal.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-encrypt-data-on-your-sma...
That article doesn‘t provide the proper caveat to enabling the erase data option for passcode lock on iphone. It's obviously dangerous if your phone data isn't continuously backed up.
> What is to stop them from compelling your PW?
> Is the 5th amendment sufficiently broad to invoke here for blanket protection?
During arrest, you have the right to remain silent.
Even if there's a circumstance in which the police can compel you to decrypt your phone, you're virtually certain to be able to have your attorney present when that happens.
Only insofar as needed to protect the arresting officer from harm or to prevent the destruction of evidence.[1]
Interestingly, search incident to arrest might not allow the police to search a vehicle's trunk.
Edit: Can't find the case, but the rationale according to a secondary source is "The search was invalid because the viewing of the tape was unnecessary to ensure its return to the defendant and it did not further any valid objective of an inventory search."
So the rationale hangs on the definition of the "valid objectives" of an inventory search. The "objectives [of an inventory search are] preserving the property of the defendant, shielding the police against claims of lost property, and protecting the police and others from any dangerous objects.
Ten years ago they didn't have any of these tools that they now claim are indispensable to do their jobs. How did they do their jobs back then?
Because, a phone isn't just you. It is you and everyone you communicate with.
To be fair, ten (well, twenty) years ago people did all those things in a way that was much more visible to the police. People would go get film developed at the drug store, people would use pay phones, etc.
If you were a part of a criminal enterprise twenty years ago you developed your own film and never use the randomly chosen pay phone more than once.
I would even go as far to say that their jobs of collecting usable evidence is much easier today than it was twenty years ago.
"my job is difficult" is not sufficient reason to justify what they are asking for.
I'm by no means a whole-hearted supporter of DOJ's position on this, but I think their opponents are also exaggerating the availability of other options to collect evidence later.
Regardless, if the hypothetical possiblity that some incredibly uncommon dead man's switch exists is justification for this sort of search, then only allow that sort of search if the police have some sort of reasonable suspicion such a switch exists.
It's analogous to how unwarranted home searches are permitted only if an officer reasonably believes there's imminent destruction of evidence - we don't just allow all home searches without warrants because somewhere out there someone might destroy evidence in their house.
You have good points. Both sides seem to be pushing for the extreme permissiveness or restriction in their respective viewpoints, but the best probably lies in between, as you say.
I guess really smart and serious dealers are going to use cheap burners AND not save numbers, or at least only with useless (to the police) names.
You then have the option of keeping a backup version of the key file somewhere separate, where police aren't going to be able to find it or using a dead man's switch which triggers the destruction of the backup key on a longer timescale (1 day, 1 week).
Of course, encrypting the phone with a password whenever the screen goes off serves essentially the same purpose, the only difference being that using an auto-shredded key file would likely be slightly more convenient for day-to-day use, and that once the key file is shredded, it's impossible for them to compel the login information from you; the best they can do is get the location of the backup key from you, which can itself be booby-trapped to self-destruct (this has the advantage that it's stored on hardware YOU control, whereas a self-destruct password on the phone itself wouldn't do much if they bother to make a backup image before they start trying to decrypt it).
I believe we would be exposed to the inanity of their methods and means. It is sheer embarrassment that they don't want their actions logged.
Plus I believe that stuff is often public knowledge, it's just not collected in an easy to use manner I would imagine.
It's not that warrants are bad, it's just that the abuse of warrants and SWAT being used for trivial warrants makes them seem bad.