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New York Law Enforcement Officials Operate $10 Million Lab Designed to Crack iPhones


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Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. built and oversees a $10 million high-tech forensics lab built expressly for the purpose for cracking iPhones, according to a new profile done by Fast Company.

 

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The lab is equipped with "mind-bending hardware" and a team of technology experts, many of whom are ex-military. The facility itself features a radiofrequency isolation chamber that prevents iPhones being used in investigations from being accessed remotely to keep them from being wiped.

 

Vance's team has thousands of iPhones at the facility in various stages of being cracked. There's a supercomputer that generates 26 million random passcodes per second, a robot that can remove memory chips without using heat, and specialized tools for repairing damaged devices to make them accessible once again.

All of the iPhones are hooked up to computers that are generating passcodes in an effort to get into the iPhones, and sometimes that requires going through tens of thousands of number combinations. Those who work at the facility, including director Steven Moran, also attempt to narrow down possibilities using birthdays, significant dates, and other info that could be used in each specific case for an iPhone passcode.

Proprietary workflow software tracks all of the iPhones at the facility, including their software and their importance, for the purpose of deciding which ‌iPhone‌ to work on and which might be able to be cracked using a newly found third-party solution.

Vance has been a major critic of Apple and has called on the government to introduce anti-encryption legislation to make it easier for law enforcement officials to get into iPhones needed for criminal investigations. According to Vance, 82 percent of smartphones that come into the unit are locked, and his cybercrime lab can crack "about half."

Apple's frequent software updates continually make breaking into iPhones harder by making the process more complicated, which can make it close to impossible to breach an ‌iPhone‌ in a timely manner. "The problem with that, particularly from a law enforcement perspective, is, first of all, time matters to us," said Vance.

Vance believes that it's "not fair" that Apple and Google can prevent law enforcement officials from accessing smartphones. Vance says that law enforcement is entrusted with a responsibility to "protect the public" but Apple and Google have limited access to information "just because they say so." Vance is of the opinion that there should be a "balance" between protecting user privacy and getting justice for victims of crimes.

"That's not their call. And it's not their call because there's something bigger here at issue rather than their individual determination of where to balance privacy and public safety. What's bigger is you've got victims and you've got a law enforcement community who have strong imperatives that should be recognized and balanced equally with the subject decision-makers by the heads of Apple and Google. Today, I think it's unbalanced.

Apple's argument is that it provides ‌iPhone‌ data from iCloud without breaking into the ‌iPhone‌ itself, but Vance says that a serious criminal doesn't have an ‌iCloud‌ backup. A user can also choose what information is stored remotely, and "in many cases" smartphones do not backup between the time when a crime takes place and an ‌iPhone‌ is shut off.

Law enforcement officials can also obtain device metadata like the time and location of a phone call from SIM cards or phone carriers, but Moran says that's the difference between being able to read a letter and being limited to just the envelope the letter came in.

"Even if we are lucky enough to get into the cloud or even if we're lucky enough to get some of the metadata, we're still missing an awful lot of important information that's critical to the investigation."

Vance says that he's not "whining" about the encryption problem, but his lab is "not the answer" as most of the U.S. can't afford to do the work that the New York cyber lab does.

Fast Company's profile of Vance's cyber lab comes as Apple is gearing up for another battle with the FBI. Apple has been asked to unlock the iPhones used by Florida shooter Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, and while Apple has provided ‌iCloud‌ data, the company will fight requests to unlock the actual devices.

For more on New York's High Technology Analysis Unit and facility, make sure to check out Fast Company's full profile.
 

 

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Vid Police Scotland to roll out encryption bypass technology, as one publication reported this week, causing some Register readers to silently mouth: what the hell?

With all the brouhaha over the FBI, like a broken record, once again demanding Apple backdoor its iPhone security, and tech companies under pressure to weaken their cryptography, how has the Scottish plod sidestepped all this and bypassed encryption?

What magic do they possess that world powers do not, as some of you asked us.

It's pretty simple: the force is using bog-standard Cellebrite gear that, typically, plugs into smartphones via USB and attempts to forcibly unlock the handsets, allowing their encrypted contents to be decrypted and examined by investigators.

This is widely used kit – sold to cops, businesses and spies around the world – and it will be set up in various police stations across Scotland. We're told selected officers will use the gear, when possible, to leaf through physically seized devices to see if the phones' data is relevant to specific investigations, and whether it's worth sending them off to a proper lab to extract the contents.

It's a controversial move here in the UK, in that politicians, worried about the legality of it all, previously pumped the brakes on the tech deployment – which was scheduled for mid-2018 and is only now actually happening.

What's going on?

Police Scotland is set to install 41 of what it refers to as "Cyber Kiosks" in stations around the country. The computers, reportedly costing £370,000 in total, will be used to attempt to view data from locked iOS and Android handsets in the course of criminal investigations.

"The technology allows specially trained officers to triage mobile devices to determine if they contain information which may be of value to a police investigation or incident," the Scottish cops say of the program.

"This will allow lines of enquiry to be progressed at a much earlier stage and devices that are not relevant to an investigation to be returned quicker."

The kiosks are built by Cellebrite, an Israeli vendor that specializes in providing law enforcement agencies with gear to bypass passcode locks on handsets. You can see one in action in this promo video from Police Scotland:

 

Unlike the more secretive phone-unlocking-hardware maker GrayShift, Cellebrite is somewhat more upfront and straightforward about its products, openly boasting about its ability to bypass lock screens on iPhone and Android handsets.

The technology works in various ways: Cellebrite says for some phone models, its equipment copies a custom bootloader to the device's RAM and runs that to bypass security mechanisms [PDF]. In some other cases, such as with Android devices, it tries to temporarily root the handset. The equipment can also attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in phone firmware, including iOS, to ultimately extract data.

It really depends on the hardware and operating system combination. Apple and Google tend to patch vulnerabilities exploited by this type of unlocking gear, in a security arms race of sorts.

Cellebrite claims its top-end gear can "bypass or determine locks and perform a full file system extraction on any iOS device, or a physical extraction or full file system (File-Based Encryption) extraction on many high-end Android devices." Privacy International has an analysis of Cellebrite's advertised – stress, advertised – capabilities here.

According to Police Scotland, the kiosks will not store any copies of handsets' storage memory, and instead will be used to observe data on device so that officers can decide whether to return the handsets to their owners or send the phones off for further investigation by a forensics lab.

Additionally, the police claim, officers are not gaining any additional powers; rather, the equipment just speeds up the triage process that would have previously required a lab, we're told. Any searches using the kiosks will be carried out on the same legal basis [PDF] as any other search: officers are allowed to look through seized items that are suspected to be evidence of a crime.

"The common law of Scotland operates no differently in relation to the seizure of a digital device by a police officer in the course of an investigation to any other item which is reasonably suspected to be evidence in a police investigation or incident," according to the force.

"Therefore, if a police officer in the execution of a lawful power seizes a digital device, the law allows for the examination of that device for information held within."

An FAQ [PDF] adds that in special cases, including those involving child abuse images, internal or disciplinary cases, and devices already known to have evidence, the kiosks will be bypassed and the phones sent directly to the forensics lab.

The roll-out of these terminals is set to begin on January 20 and completed by the end of May.

And breathe out

Unfortunately, none of this should be a surprise to you. Depending on your phone model, there are various ways for the police to potentially delve into your device.

As Forbes pointed out earlier this week, cops in the US last year tried to use a GrayShift product to read the contents of a locked and encrypted iPhone 11 Pro Max, according to a search warrant. It's not clear whether the extraction was actually successful; the police paperwork merely declares a "USB drive containing GrayKey-derived forensic analysis" of the iPhone as evidence.

Still, if all this unlocking kit is out there, one wonders why the FBI and others are demanding law-enforcement backdoors in gadgets. Is it because it doesn't always work? Or are the Feds tired of forking out wads of cash for gear made by Cellebrite, GrayShift et al, and want a cheap and easy built-in solution instead? Or both? ®

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