ISIS: Terror In America

[R.K. Locke]

You forgot the part where the media deliberately adds sensational and largely untrue gossip, rumor, and speculation, to scare the crap out of people and keep them glued to their screens for the next commercial break.

Always from "anonymous sources" within the intelligence community. It's a finely honed script at this point.

[Drew Phipps]

It's always some "government official" "close to the investigation" "not authorized to speak publicly." Well then, if so, why don't you just keep your trap shut?

[Michael Barwell]

FBI overpaid $999,900 to crack San Bernardino iPhone 5c password
Hacker brews fast NAND mirroring prototype for $100. 19 Sep 2016 at 04:58, Team Register - http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/19/..._password/

University of Cambridge senior research associate Sergei Skorobogatov has laid waste to United States Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) assertions about iPhone security by demonstrating password bypassing using a $100 NAND mirroring rig.
FBI director James Comey made the claim during the agency's bid to defeat the password lock screen protection on the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone 5c.
The hacking effort erupted into a sparring match between the FBI and Apple, after the agency asked Cupertino to bypass the device's password protection. The agency reportedly paid a security firm more than US$1 million to concoct a bypass for the device.
Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarsk first flagged NAND mirroring as an option to defeat iPhone password protection and the security controls that would erase device data if the wrong codes were entered 10 times.
Skorobogatov built a working prototype demonstrating how NAND mirroring could work using off-the-shelf components for an updated iPhone 5c, revealing a password in about 24 hours.
The researcher spent four months of part-time work to successfully remove the iPhone 5c NAND memory chip, cloning it so he could launch brute-force attacks against the password control.
Skorobogatov says his work is the first public demonstration of a working NAND mirroring prototype and show the FBI's claims on the technique "were ill-advised".
"[It] was achieved by desoldering the NAND flash chip of a sample phone in order to physically access its connection to the system-on-a-chip and partially reverse engineering its proprietary bus protocol," Skorobogatov says in the paper The bumpy road towards iPhone 5c NAND mirroring [PDF].
"The process does not require any expensive and sophisticated equipment. All needed parts are low cost and were obtained from local electronics distributors.
"By using the described and successful hardware mirroring process it was possible to bypass the limit on passcode retry attempts."
The attacks could also work against iPhone 6 with more sophisticated hardware, Skorobogatov says.
He found Apple employed security-through-obscurity rather than "fully thought through" hardening in its protection against NAND mirroring attacks.
Skorobogatov says his set up could help Apple and others find hardware security problems and reliability issues, citing his discovery that some NAND chips from broken iPhone 5c main boards had specific blocks that had failed due to excessive rewriting.
"This might happen because of a bug in Flash memory wear-levelling algorithm as it was implemented in software," he says. ®
ENDE

Hardware hack defeats iPhone passcode security 19 September 2016 - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37407047

IPhone passcodes can be bypassed using just £75 ($100) of electronic components, research suggests.
A Cambridge computer scientist cloned iPhone memory chips, allowing him an unlimited number of attempts to guess a passcode.
The work contradicts a claim made by the FBI earlier this year that this approach would not work.
The FBI made the claim as it sought access to San Bernardino gunman Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone.
Farook and his wife killed 14 people in the California city last December before police fatally shot them.

The FBI believed his iPhone 5C contained information about collaborators, but its security system prevented easy access.
The agency pressured Apple to give it a software backdoor into the phone, and, when it refused, reportedly paid $1m to a security company to retrieve data from the phone.
Now, Dr Sergei Skorobogatov, from the University of Cambridge computer laboratory, has spent four months building a testing rig to bypass iPhone 5C pin codes.
In a YouTube video, Dr Skorobogatov showed how he had removed a Nand chip from an iPhone 5C - the main memory storage system used on many Apple devices.
He then worked out how the memory system communicated with the phone so he could clone the chip.

And the target phone was modified so its Nand chip sat on an external board and copied versions could be easily plugged in or removed.
In the video, Dr Skorobogatov demonstrated locking an iPhone 5C by trying too many incorrect combinations.
He then removed the Nand chip and substituted a fresh clone, which had its pin attempt counter set at zero, to allow him to keep trying different codes.
"Because I can create as many clones as I want, I can repeat the process many many times until the passcode is found," he said.
Known as Nand mirroring, the technique is one FBI director James Comey said would not work on Farook's phone.
Finding a four-digit code took about 40 hours of work, Dr Skorobogatov said.
And finding a six-digit code could potentially take hundreds of hours
Using a slightly more sophisticated set-up should make it possible to clone memory chips from other iPhones, including more recent models such as the iPhone 6.
However, Dr Skorobogatov said, more information was needed about the way Apple stored data in memory on more recent phones.
The different techniques could make it "more challenging to analyse and copy", he added.
Apple has not responded to a request for comment on Dr Skorobogatov's research.
Susan Landau, on the Lawfare news blog, said the work showed law enforcement agencies should not look for software backdoors to help their investigations but should develop or cultivate hardware and computer security skills.
"Skorobogatov was able to do what the FBI said was impossible," she said.