FBI Director: We're Only Forcing Apple To Undermine Security Because We Chase Down Every Lead

from the bull-and-shit dept

Over the weekend the narrative the FBI has been trying to spread around the legal effort to get Apple to build a system that lets the FBI hack Apple customers began to crumble, as it was revealed that the FBI's own actions were largely responsible for the fact that the information on Syed Farook's phone was no longer accessible. That gave more and more weight to the argument that the whole reason that the FBI did this was to set a precedent that judges can force companies to hack their own customers, should the FBI want them to do so. Again, it seems fairly obvious that the FBI chose this case in particular, because basically everyone agrees that Farook and his wife were bad people who murdered a bunch of Farook's co-workers. That obviously makes the FBI's case more sympathetic for setting a precedent. But with the shady actions that resulted in the data being locked up, that nice story was starting to slip away.

Apparently the FBI decided to send in the big guns to try to rescue the narrative. FBI Director Jim Comey -- the guy who's been fear mongering the longest about strong encryption -- put up a blog post on the surveillance apologist blog Lawfare -- in which he insists that this case isn't about all the things it's really about:

The San Bernardino litigation isn't about trying to set a precedent or send any kind of message.

No, he claims, it's really because the FBI wants to "look the survivors in the eye" and say they followed every lead:

It is about the victims and justice. Fourteen people were slaughtered and many more had their lives and bodies ruined. We owe them a thorough and professional investigation under law. That's what this is. The American people should expect nothing less from the FBI.

The particular legal issue is actually quite narrow. The relief we seek is limited and its value increasingly obsolete because the technology continues to evolve. We simply want the chance, with a search warrant, to try to guess the terrorist's passcode without the phone essentially self-destructing and without it taking a decade to guess correctly. That's it. We don't want to break anyone's encryption or set a master key loose on the land. I hope thoughtful people will take the time to understand that. Maybe the phone holds the clue to finding more terrorists. Maybe it doesn’t. But we can't look the survivors in the eye, or ourselves in the mirror, if we don't follow this lead.

Of course, if you know anything about the FBI and how it operates, this is guffaw inducing. There are tons of cases where the FBI doesn't follow every lead possible. In fact, it has a pretty long history of ignoring important leads. And, lately, the FBI's main focus seems to be on creating its own terrorist plots so it can have its agents play dress up and pretend they took down a terrorist ring. In many of those cases, the FBI failed to chase down tons of leads, and instead entrapped or framed otherwise innocent people. The idea that it suddenly is concerned with chasing down every lead is ludicrous.

Comey is playing politics here, not giving a legitimate reason. And, yes, while some of the families of victims in San Bernardino are supporting the FBI, some of them think the FBI is going too far.

The ex-wife of another deceased victim, meanwhile, said she is concerned that the court might be jeopardizing iPhone users’ privacy rights.

Karen Fagan, of Upland, is the ex-wife of Harry “Hal” Bowman and mother of their two daughters.

“This is a very different thing than asking for data that is Apple’s possession,” Fagan wrote in an email. “They have complied with all of those requests. This is asking them to build a new piece of technology that could be used to invade the privacy of any iPhone. Furthermore, the FBI is citing an act written in 1789 (instead of new legislative action) to justify their request.

“I know that it is a tempting argument to say that we should allow government access to private information in order to make people feel safe. After all, the argument goes, people who aren’t breaking the law have nothing to hide. While that may be true, American citizens have been granted privacy rights, and this request breaches those rights,” Fagan wrote.

How will Comey look Karen Fagan in the eye and tell her he jeopardized the privacy and safety of millions of Americans just to find out that there's nothing useful on the guy everyone already knows murdered her husband?

Comey, meanwhile, reverts back to the same talking point he's been making for months, that he just wants a "public debate" on this:

Reflecting the context of this heart-breaking case, I hope folks will take a deep breath and stop saying the world is ending, but instead use that breath to talk to each other. Although this case is about the innocents attacked in San Bernardino, it does highlight that we have awesome new technology that creates a serious tension between two values we all treasure: privacy and safety. That tension should not be resolved by corporations that sell stuff for a living. It also should not be resolved by the FBI, which investigates for a living. It should be resolved by the American people deciding how we want to govern ourselves in a world we have never seen before. We shouldn't drift to a place—or be pushed to a place by the loudest voices—because finding the right place, the right balance, will matter to every American for a very long time.

And yet, we've had that discussion and the public spoke out by buying and using tools with strong encryption -- and by telling Congress they didn't want a law outlawing strong encryption. So, contrary to Comey's claims, it is the FBI that's trying to force the issue by going to court over this particular search warrant.

Filed Under: backdoor, encryption, fbi, going dark, hacking, james comey, precedent, san bernardino, syed farook
Companies: apple

FBI's Own Actions Likely Made Farook's iPhone Data Inaccessible

from the oops dept

On Friday, we noted that one of the reasons that the FBI was unable to get access to the data on the remaining iPhone from Syed Farook was because after the shooting and after the phone was in the hands of the government, Farook's employer, the San Bernardino Health Department, initiated a password change on his iCloud account. That apparently messed stuff up, because without that, it would have been possible to force the phone to backup data to the associated iCloud account, where it would have been available to the FBI. But, after we published that article, a rather salient point came out: the Health Department only did this because the FBI asked it to do so.

From a San Bernardino County Twitter account:

The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI's request.

— CountyWire (@CountyWire) February 20, 2016

If you can't read that, it says: "The County was working cooperatively with the FBI when it reset the iCloud password at the FBI's request."

In short: a big reason why the FBI can't get the info it wants is because of an action taken... by the FBI.

Apple has also provided further information on this, showing how it was perfectly willing to cooperate in reasonable ways with the FBI -- but that it was the FBI that messed things up:

The Apple executive told reporters that the company’s engineers had first suggested to the government that it take the phone to the suspect’s apartment to connect it to the Wi-Fi there. But since reporters and members of the public had swarmed that crime scene shortly after the shootings occurred, it was likely that any Wi-Fi there had been disconnected. So Apple suggested the government take the phone to Farook’s former workplace and connect the phone to a Wi-Fi network there.

The executive said that Apple walked the government through the entire process to accomplish this, but the government came back about two weeks later and told Apple that it hadn’t worked.

Apple didn’t understand why it had not worked—until the company learned that sometime after the phone had been taken into the custody of law enforcement, someone had gone online and changed the Apple ID that the phone uses to conduct backups.

Two interesting points in there: first, do you remember how there was all this discussion about the insane media scrum that ransacked Farook's house? And lots of people pointed out that useful evidence may have been harmed by it. At the time, the FBI insisted they were all done with the house, but it appears that may have been part of the reason why they couldn't get the backup.

The second is that Apple had not revealed this tidbit earlier. The company explained that it had felt that its conversations with the government had been confidential until the FBI revealed this detail in the totally unexpected Motion to Compel it filed Friday. It appeared that the FBI was so eager to push its PR stunt that it filed the document (which it had no reason to file), and then revealed even more of its own bungling in this particular case.

Whether intentional or not, this is only going to add support to people who say that the FBI doesn't actually care what's on the phone, but wanted to be able to go after the data in this case because they knew they could set a precedent in a case where their argument will generate the most sympathy. Remember, back in September, after the Intelligence Community lost the fight to get a law banning strong encryption, intelligence officials said out loud that they'd just wait until the next terrorist attack:

Although “the legislative environment is very hostile today,” the intelligence community’s top lawyer, Robert S. Litt, said to colleagues in an August e-mail, which was obtained by The Post, “it could turn in the event of a terrorist attack or criminal event where strong encryption can be shown to have hindered law enforcement.”

There is value, he said, in “keeping our options open for such a situation.”

Two months later, you get a "terrorist attack" (or a workplace dispute that can be painted as a terrorist attack) and a sorta, kinda encrypted phone, and voila. Just what the intel community asked for. It would be crazy to suggest that any of this was done on purpose -- it's almost certainly a bit of convenience for the intel and law enforcement communities. But the fact that the FBI directed the Health Department to change the password, and that's part of the reason they're now locked out, really raises some questions about what the FBI's priorities were here. It also raises a separate question of whether or not companies should be forced to hack their own system in cases where the FBI's own bungling was responsible for the loss of information. But, really, that's a minor point, given that the DOJ wants that power even in cases where the FBI didn't mess things up itself.

Filed Under: encryption, fbi, icloud, password reset, san bernardino county, syed farook

Footnote Reveals That The San Bernardino Health Dept. Reset Syed Farook's Password, Which Is Why We're Now In This Mess

from the well,-that's-interesting dept

We already discussed the many issues with the DOJ's motion to compel Apple to create a backdoor to let them brute force the passcode on Syed Farook's iPhone. However, eagle-eyed Chris Soghoian caught something especially interesting in a footnote. Footnote 7, on page 18 details four possible ways that Apple and the FBI had previously discussed accessing the content on the device without having to undermine the basic security system of the iPhone, and one of them only failed because Farook's employers reset the password after the attacks, in an attempt to get into the device. The key line:

... to attempt an auto-backup of the SUBJECT DEVICE with the related iCloud account (which would not work in this cases because neither the owner nor the government knew the password to the iCloud account and the owner, in an attempt to gain access to some information in the hours after the attack, was able to reset the password remotely, but that had the effect of eliminating the possibility of an auto-backup).

The "owner" of course, being the San Bernardino Health Department, who employed Farook and gave him the phone. Basically, what this is saying is that if the password hadn't been reset, it would have been possible to try to connect the phone to a "trusted" network, and force an automatic backup to iCloud -- which (as has been previously noted) was available to the FBI. But by "changing" the password, apparently that option went away.

In other words, the San Bernardino Health Dept may have been the ones who really mucked things up for the FBI. But, of course, to be honest, the FBI is probably kind of happy about that. At this point, very few people honestly believe that there's anything of much value on that phone. But this situation allows the FBI to present the most sympathetic case it probably can to try to force backdoors onto tech companies.

Filed Under: doj, encryption, fbi, password, reset, san bernardino, san bernardino health department, syed farook
Companies: apple

Apple Responds To Order To Help Decrypt Phone, As More Details Come To Light

from the both-not-as-bad-and-just-as-bad dept

Update: Please see our more recent article detailing why it appears that this attack could apply to more modern iPhones as well.

Last night, we wrote about a judge's order commanding Apple to help the FBI effectively decrypt the contents of Syed Farook's iPhone 5C. Farook, of course, along with his wife, was responsible for the San Bernardino attacks a few months ago. Many of the initial reports about the order suggested that it simply ordered Apple to break the encryption -- which made many people scoff. However, as we noted, that was not accurate. Instead, it was ordering something much more specific: that Apple create a special firmware that would disable two distinct security features within iOS -- one that would effectively wipe the encrypted contents following 10 failed attempts at entering the unlocking PIN (by throwing away the stored decryption key) and a second one that would progressively slow down the amount of time between repeated attempts at entering the PIN.

Late last night, Apple's Tim Cook also posted a very direct Message to Our Customers that highlights the importance of strong encryption and why this order is such a problem (some of which we'll discuss below).

Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us.

For many years, we have used encryption to protect our customers’ personal data because we believe it’s the only way to keep their information safe. We have even put that data out of our own reach, because we believe the contents of your iPhone are none of our business.

He notes -- as I did in my original post -- that the FBI is demanding (and the court has agreed) to force Apple to create a backdoor and that creates a number of concerns:

Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.

Some would argue that building a backdoor for just one iPhone is a simple, clean-cut solution. But it ignores both the basics of digital security and the significance of what the government is demanding in this case.

In today’s digital world, the “key” to an encrypted system is a piece of information that unlocks the data, and it is only as secure as the protections around it. Once the information is known, or a way to bypass the code is revealed, the encryption can be defeated by anyone with that knowledge.

The government suggests this tool could only be used once, on one phone. But that’s simply not true. Once created, the technique could be used over and over again, on any number of devices. In the physical world, it would be the equivalent of a master key, capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks — from restaurants and banks to stores and homes. No reasonable person would find that acceptable.

Having spent a bunch of time overnight reading through the details of the DOJ's original application, as well as reading through a few public discussions by security experts and, especially, Robert Graham's useful thoughts about the order as well, I have some further thoughts -- including that I think Cook may be slightly overstating his case with his comments, because it's not actually clear that the backdoor the FBI is asking for would actually work on most modern iPhones, though it might work on older phones. However, the larger concerns about the order are still very much valid.

1. One of the concerns I raised last night was probably inaccurate: that this could force Apple into creating a tool that would put many people's privacy at risk. The order does seem fairly specific to just this phone. Yes, as Cook notes, if Apple is forced to do this and Apple does it successfully, that would open up similar orders for other phones, but the impact of that may be somewhat limited in that it only applies to older phones, and quite possibly older iPhones that have not updated their operating systems.
2. It does seem clear that if this were a newer iPhone, which includes Apple's "Security Enclave" system, this request would likely be impossible to meet. It's quite interesting to read the details of how Apple's security now works, where the Security Enclave basically cuts off this possibility, because the firmware update itself would wipe out the encryption key, effectively making it impossible to decrypt the content. It's also possible that even in the older phone this order is still impossible, if the operating system was properly updated -- in part because they may not be able to update the firmware without putting in the passcode, which is the problem they want this new firmware to solve.
3. I keep seeing people say "why can't they just copy the contents of the memory and brute force it elsewhere" but that's not possible with the iPhone, since a part of the key comes from the hardware itself, and there doesn't appear to be any way to extract it (and Apple does not keep it).
4. The whole focus seems to be on allowing the FBI to bruteforce the passcode, which is in the realm of possibility should the two impediments above be removed, as opposed to bruteforce cracking AES encryption, which is not currently in the realm of possibility.

Graham disagrees with me over whether this is about decrypting or a backdoor -- but to some extent that's just semantics (and Cook agrees with me that it's a backdoor). They're not asking for a systemwide backdoor -- and, indeed, it appears this approach wouldn't work at all with more recent iPhones. However, the reason I focused on a backdoor, rather than direct decryption, is that the way most people were discussing "decryption" indicated that they seemed to think the court was ordering the impossible, which was "crack the keys you don't have access to." Instead, they are asking for a backdoor -- just a narrow one that can only be used for this phone and would be ineffective against most modern iPhones. And then that backdoor will be used to brute force the passcode, which would then decrypt the content of Farook's iPhone.

That said, there are still serious concerns. While the DOJ insists that its use of the 18th Century All Writs Act in this case is pretty ordinary and standard, they're exaggerating in the extreme. Some of the previous examples they discuss do include requirements to use certain machinery in order to execute a warrant, but that's quite different from ordering Apple to write entirely new software. The DOJ again insists that there are examples of All Writs Act requests in the past that have required software, but it's notable that when the DOJ says this, it does not immediately cite any cases, but rather says just that sometimes providers have to "write code in order to gather information in response to subpoenas or other process." There's a pretty big difference between writing some scraping or search code, which this implies, and creating a special firmware as the DOJ is asking for in this case.

Also, as Cook notes, the unprecedented nature of this is that it's not at all similar to previous cases, because this would involve actively undermining the security of devices, rather than just helping to gather information that is readily available.

In fact, even more ridiculous is the idea, as laid out in the DOJ's application for this order, that this will not be burdensome to Apple simply because Apple writes software:

While the order in this case requires Apple to provide modified software, modifying an operating system - writing software code - is not an unreasonable burden for a company that writes software code as part of its regular business.

Uh, yeah, it can be when what you're asking for is fairly complex and may not even be possible depending on the specifics of the way the security in the iPhone 5C is designed. And, seriously, just saying "Apple writes software, therefore any request for it to write software is not burdensome" is ridiculous on its face.

There's a separate question, raised by people such as Chris Soghoian, about whether or not this particular use of the All Writs Act to force Apple to use its code signing keys to "sign" this new firmware violates the First Amendment in compelling speech. It will be interesting to see if Apple raises this issue in its inevitable appeal of the order.

In the end, this is both a big deal and potentially not a big deal. It's a big deal in that after a few previous attempts to use the All Writs Act to force Apple to "decrypt" content on a phone, a court has not only done so, but done so with fairly specific instructions on what Apple has to do to create a very specific bit of software that removes a couple security features. That raises a bunch of legal questions, that I would imagine Apple will quickly raise in response as well. However, from a technological standpoint, it appears that many of these questions will soon be moot, so long as people have more modern and updated phones. But the bigger concern, as Cook notes, is the precedent here that a court can order, at the behest of the FBI, that a tech company undermine the security of a device. As he notes, once you start down that slippery slope it's not hard to see where that can lead:

The implications of the government’s demands are chilling. If the government can use the All Writs Act to make it easier to unlock your iPhone, it would have the power to reach into anyone’s device to capture their data. The government could extend this breach of privacy and demand that Apple build surveillance software to intercept your messages, access your health records or financial data, track your location, or even access your phone’s microphone or camera without your knowledge.

This particular legal battle is going to get very, very interesting.

Filed Under: all writs act, backdoors, decryption, doj, encryption, fbi, going dark, iphone, syed farook, tim cook
Companies: apple