Excellent point. I never understood that either.

If their concern is that a password cracker would cause the phone to scratch its memory, why don't they just open the damned phone and remove the memory card? It's not like they need a soldering iron.

You have to be 100% right. This is not a new issue, after all. They've been battling Apple, Samsung, and Google over strong encryption for more than two years. This isn't about the San Bernardino shooter's phone. They are bullying Apple for a method that they can use anytime. In the field.

By the way, China is watching this thing closely. You can be sure that if the U.S. gets its "back door," China will demand it too, of any company that wishes to do business there.

 

Talking about being "mistaken",..

You're about 12,000 miles wrong....... Slutwolf is a Kiwi.

 

It is interest how so many have let phones become almost the most important thing in their lives ,
go nowhere without them ,
can't go half an hour without checking them ,
never turn them off ,
and basically just let them rule their lives..
They'd observe and communicate with real people a lot better without them ,
and miss out on what ?

 

That was an observation,
and it is a little bit relevant to the topic I started ,
and some of the questions I have asked ,
and to some other points others have made throughout the thread.

The most important point to me , and of this thread is the original.

Refusing to try to help catch/uncover , find , prevent , things like mass murder , thereby protecting the perpetrators , planners and instigators .

Law enforcement is struggling to try to keep up with technology now.
If they are not allowed to , then the world will quickly become an even more dangerous place.
Criminals have never operated under the same restraints,
and never will. They will soon gain huge advantage and snub their noses , because cops can't get the evidence.

 

Just curious how long before this battle morphs into the loss of Attorney-Client privilege, Doctor-Patient Confidentiality or even The Second Amendment ?

 

Ah, land of the not so free, home of modern day slavery.

 

They never refused to do that, because they were never asked.

If Apple had been asked to crack that phone, using whatever method Apple thought would get the information soonest, the FBI would have the contents of the phone already.

The FBI didn't ask for that. The FBI asked for the security of all iPhones to be compromised. Its very obvious if you read the actual writ. The writ includes technical instructions on what the FBI wants done. It doesn't say "get us the information to the best of Apple's ability".

 

There is no memory card, dammed or otherwise.

Apple doesn't use such clunky packaging for its ICs. It'd be a job for a very skilled technician to recover the flash chip, but that's one very obvious way of going about it.

 

Just to make things clear. The FBI is the bad guy here. The FBI is delaying their own investigation so they can compromise the liberties of everyone in the country.

They've got people like Slutwolf and Trump baying for blood. Where its the FBI should be impeached for massive crimes against the constitution.

 

Ugh.

You sure? You've seen inside one? I haven't. I realize it's not an SD card, but iPhones come with different disk capacities. You're saying the solid state memory is really integrated onto the main board? That would mean a different main board for each flavor of phone.

I'm not saying you're wrong. All I'm saying is this would surprise me.

 

Cite to me the passage in the Constitution which sets forth an absolute "Right to Privacy."

Such a Right is made up bullshit pulled out of some liberal judge's ass.

 

So, I've looked and answered my own question:

TonyBs is right, the internal flash memory of the iPhone is soldered to the "logic board."

That said, it is most certainly removable. Apply a little heat, and presto. Not just anyone could do it, but any hobbyist could do it, and the FBI could certainly do it.

The question then is, now what?

You can't solder it onto the logic board of another phone. The memory is encrypted, and the encryption key is stored on the CPU. (The A5 chip.) The "host" CPU would have the wrong key, and the memory would still be locked.

So, how about extracting the contents with a bitwise read, and working on the encryption on some other device?

The would probably be above the FBI's paygrade. They'd have to reverse engineer the iPhone's logic board, just to build a pin block that could be used to extract the contents.

Hmm. The iPhone has damned good encryption.

 

How about the right "to be secure" which is written plain as day in your version of the constitution. The FBI is trying to trample all over that.

 

Yes, earlier ones. I worked on them. They have been doing interesting things with package integration. I wasn't sure if that included the flash or not. If it is on the mother board it's probably a BGA, which a soldering iron won't help you. You need a heat gun to remove it. You might kill the chip if you're not careful. It's not going back on short of a reflow machine.

Apple probably has a test fixture ("bed of nails") they could plug the board into to read the flash.

 

On an enthusiast site, while doing my homework (since I admit at first I was talking out of my ass), I saw a youtube video of a technician removing the flash chip from the logic board with a solder gun.

As to the pin board notion: definitely they would have matching pinblocks for testing/diagnostics. They couldn't read it with such a device, but they could at least extract the encrypted data and hand it over as a raw file.

Then the FBI would need two things, to use the brute forcing method that it claims it wants to use on "this single device." (Recall that what the FBI CLAIMS is that they want to try passwords randomly, to unlock the data on this particular device.) (I don't believe for a second that this is all they really want.) To try brute forcing they need:

1. The key, off the A5 chip. To get it the key alone, Apple still has to write a back door through iOS. Even after helping them extract the raw data. (Insane.)

2. The algorithm. I understand it's not some straightforward method like AES256. It is described as "proprietary." My guess is they're using an elliptical cipher. (Which, by the way, violates federal law, if true, because elliptical is essentially uncrackable, and it is a violation of U.S. federal law to implement any form of encryption that NSA can't crack.)

If Apple were to give in on either of those two things: to write a backdoor into the iOS for extraction of the key, or worse, to hand over the encryption algorithm-- it would open every Apple device up to all the hackers on earth.

 

Explanation for noobs:

Most forms of encryption typically involve at least two "keys," referred to as "public" and "private." The actual encryption pattern (which is used to scramble the data) in the most common forms of encryption is a product of the keys. (When you type "https" before a URL, you are using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer), which implements a lite flavor of PKE (Public Key Encryption). The "keys" are giant prime numbers. The "scramble pattern" is a product of the numbers. In order to crack the encryption, you have to know the factors of the product. For this reason, the "keys" are typically giant prime numbers, because large products of primes take a long time to factor. When we say "256 bit encryption," we are saying that we are using a product of two or more keys, each of which is a prime number up to 256 bit registers long. This is not the best encryption available, it is merely the best encryption that the federal government will allow us to use, because the NSA can rapidly crack it whenever they choose.

Is there 1024 bit encryption? Sure. 2048? You betcha! But you can't buy it, and you can go to federal prison if you're caught using it.

Neat, huh?

Now, proprietary devices like the Apple iPhone are a gray area, because they are not encrypting communications. They are encrypting the device itself.

Their "proprietary method" (most likely elliptical encryption) is not simply using a product of big prime numbers. Elliptical encryption uses wacky math (combinatorics) and is essentially unbreakable without both the keys and the algorithm.

Incidentally, American phone companies are siding with the government against Apple, and they are advocating on the government's behalf. Phone companies have been required by federal law to provide back doors into their networks since 1997. They want the smart phone manufacturers to be subject to back doors as well, so that they can compete more effectively against those manufacturers.

Sort of reminds me of cabbies and limo drivers in Paris ganging up on Uber.

Who's going to win? The cabbies or Uber?

Somehow I think Apple/Google/Facebook/Samsung are going to come out of this challenge just fine.

 

Per the liberal argument that Right was written by dead white males way back in ancient times who had never seen or even heard of an iPhone or any other modern technology of our enlightened age. It is therefore outdated for contemporary enlightened society which knows way more than those ancient dead ignorant white males and needs to be ignored right along with the 2nd Amendment and the other outdated things found in the Bill of Rights.

 

Its not clear if you agree or not that the constitution acknowledges a right "to be secure". Also that is exactly the right the FBI is trying to disregard.

 

Its not clear if you agree or not that the constitution acknowledges a right "to be secure". Also that is exactly the right the FBI is trying to disregard.

 

Incidentally, I think it's despicable that the blowhard Donald Trump is calling for a boycott of Apple. It exposes him as a leftist rube.

I mean, we already knew that, of course.

But one would think that with all his billions, he'd have advisers for technical issues like this. Convinces me beyond any shadow of a doubt that if he does ever get into the White House, he's gonna spew bullshit from the Oval Office, right off the cuff like a moron with Tourettes, and get us all killed.