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Comment by ggreer | Hacker News Reader

MitM with a 0-day payload? Acid etching and SEM? You would have to be an extremely high-value target to legitimately worry about this stuff.

The post is attacking a straw man. Apple's iPhone security is meant to address criminals, mass surveillance, and overzealous law enforcement. They're not claiming a single phone will withstand the entire resources of the NSA devoted to breaking it.

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> The post is attacking a straw man.

It's a straw man, but not his straw man. Pull up popular press articles about iOS8's disk encryption and you'll find that a disturbing number of them uncritically claim that it's meant to thwart the NSA. It's been driving me crazy.

Exactly. I wrote it to set the record straight: Apple's crypto is intended to guard against a limited class of attacks, and "the KGB is after me" is not one of them.

Yup. The reality is that you can't defeat the NSA unless you are able to design and fab your own silicon without any third party involvement, are able to write and audit your own crypto code with zero bugs, and are able to physically protect yourself from being "encouraged" to reveal your passphrases. It's not worth seriously trying to defeat an organisation as well funded/staffed/connected as NSA from obtaining your chat history and nude photos.

And if you're that important of a target, they're eventually just going to pick you up physically, black-bag style, from nearly anywhere on earth if they can. The NSA is the US military after all, there's really nowhere on earth that someone is entirely safe if they want you (maybe under direct protection by Beijing or Moscow).

>> "...(maybe under direct protection by Beijing or Moscow)."

This argument is bolstered by the fact that Snowden (hardly an ignorant party) sought precisely the protection you mention.

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