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Should Encryption Be Permanent?


Big Guy

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Can this encryption be bypassed electronically?

Only by guessing the password. Many hackers rely on people choosing easy-to-guess passwords which allow them to find it in much less time than the brute force method that the FBI wants. That won't help if the drive is erased after 10 tries.

Can the data be physically obtained physically by dismantling the phone and going into the hard drive?

There is no hard drive. Only flash memory. But if Apple has done their job right it will be impossible to access even if you extract the raw data from the flash.

John McAfee is a crank.

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Nonetheless libertarians have hitched themselves...

Given a choice between an alternative that wants to extend government control over all aspects of the economy and an alternative that is only looking for an intrusive security apparatus the intrusive security apparatus is the lesser evil.
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Been following this on TV. Still asking:

Can this encryption be bypassed electronically?

Can the data be physically obtained physically by dismantling the phone and going into the hard drive?

http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/mcafee-apple-iphone/

Not yet. If they get their back door the answer is yes to the first and no to the second.
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Commercial 2nm is still at least 10 years away.

Quantum computing is a totally different regime and doesn't require shrinking transistor size to implement, it's a matter of setting up the right arrangements of entangled qubits and reducing decoherence. Also, the moment you have working quantum computers you can also use quantum encryption which is fundamentally unbreakable given our understanding of the laws of quantum mechanics (no cloning theorem and observer effect).

Haven't caught up yet to comment on the main issue but saw this. I checked out a design on quantum computing a few months ago when someone raised it with me and noticed that the tech in it is a relative 'cheat'. The induction created by the loops allowing for a trinary operation in their setup requires it to be large enough to prevent that 'decoherence'. The size of it still reduces its overall effectiveness because of this and I don't see it possible to make it smaller without this problem given ANY materials we have. The very nature of particles even understood with QM to be able to have its superposition quality renders this impossible unless you could effectively prevent that from occurring. This is because it acts as induction does (action at least to some distance away) and would require some super-quantum NEW elemental particle to wall in (resist & impede) the effects of it. The most they can do to aid in reducing this is for superconductivity at low temperatures.

I'm with cybercoma on the issue of privacy here. A good indepth discussion on this is Stefan Molyneux's "The Truth about Donald Trump's Apple Boycott | Tim Cook, Privacy and Terrorism" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9gN5F4mGfo] ...if this hasn't already been raised.

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Been following this on TV. Still asking:

Can this encryption be bypassed electronically?

Can the data be physically obtained physically by dismantling the phone and going into the hard drive?

http://fortune.com/2016/02/19/mcafee-apple-iphone/

Tim mentioned the fact they use flash memory. Technically, this does not matter. It WOULD matter depending on whether this solid-state drive is distinctly separate. In this way, it may be possible to bypass. Because the flash memory is less sustained long-term when erased by read-writes or wiping, the present tech often skips complete erasure: it only 'deletes' its table-of-context entry for where the data is located in memory. Thus, this may be a more reasonable means to allow access. What they could then do is to assure that if the case is opened that it somehow disengages the functionality in some part of that memory unless the whole drive is replaced.

I believe this would have been thought of but the government probably wants to find a means to have PRESENT access or an ability to 'spy' prior to any seizure of the device. This makes them more suspect with good reason.

Note on Operating Systems: Those like Microsoft and especially, Apple, recognized the significance of creating a 'gateway' program we now call an operating system, not simply for its capacity to be useful as a way to make computers easier to use, but to command the security FLAGS which act as switches to allow the computer to act or block access by programs. The idea was to capitalize on making such a program as it takes complete control of these flags and thus makes all other programs require meeting the demands of the proprietary nature of this gateway program. That is, all programs MUST run first THROUGH the OS in order to operate. In this way, Apple was able to capitalize on this through creating a completely proprietary system requiring all other applications running on it to comply with it for licencing as they made their product most attractive. Bill Gates thought this way too but only recently (with the new Win 10) has his company now reached this level.

But both, while appearing to favor our 'privacy' concerns, actually benefit by the power they have to access our privacy. Their interests are for business though. The government's interests just want 'in' on this access too. I don't like either extreme. The government can and DO act for economic reasons too. Back doors are inevitable. The government can also skip the OS by dealing with the hardware interests working with all computing devices to assure they have command of the BIOS (a pre-operating system to initiate the main chip's initial startup data and run all the other electronics in it. This IS being (and has been) done. I think the concern with Apple is that they have been so proprietary that while they may possibly outsource to Intel, they set the design to disable the BIOS changes and may have the OS a part of this. So unlike other computers where the government already can likely command our BIOS through those chip makers, Apple is most secure.

That is, even if Tim Cook claims concerns of others turning away from Apple, all other devices are already insecure by default to government intervention (spying). This makes Apple a little more unique than other companies. I'd like to hear from other companies like Microsoft to respond to this!! [i'm being sarcastic....it would only make everyone begin to look at them for their own worse security flaws.]

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Data is stored encrypted on the internal memory chip. iPhones also have a separate security chip that manages the 256-bit AES encryption. The raw data as its stored is entirely useless to investigators. Brute force attempts to figure out the encryption key would literally take billions of years with current tech.

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So unlike other computers where the government already can likely command our BIOS through those chip makers, Apple is most secure.

The BIOS is not a master key. Drives encrypted by Windows cannot be read simply because you load another OS. As with Apple, the weak link is the user password. Longer is better. 10 letters or less are easy to crack. 16 letters or more are effectively impossible. Edited by TimG
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Conundrum

Apple won't comply with decryption. Possible scenarios includes, that the possibility that encryption does not matter and they can get to the data with ease, and if they come forth with that, then you know they've been lying to you from the start. Meaning the back doors are already built into the units.

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Here is a good Q&A on the issue. It answers a lot of the questions being discussed in this thread:

http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-versus-the-fbi-why-the-lowest-priced-iphone-has-the-us-in-a-tizzy-faq/

Do you have a link for that? It wasn't in the OP article.

Sorry, going back and looking into the article, it sounds like Apple provided all the data up to the last iCloud backup. And Verizon provided the call logs. But data after the last backup and not included in the call logs was not provided. Specifically:

As the government has confirmed, we’ve handed over all the data we have, including a backup of the iPhone in question. But now they have asked us for information we simply do not have.

That's from the Apple letter here:

http://www.apple.com/customer-letter/answers/

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  • 1 month later...

Talking about going full circle: The FBI tries to pressure APPLE into creating a software entry into APPLE's super safe phone. APPLE says no, it is not going to compromise its $billion super safe phone for any reason. The FBI goes ahead and finds a way to break into the phone. APPLE now pressures the FBI to share with them the process so they can "fix" it.

FBI says NO!

What goes around, comes around.

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This is a good time to bring up my discussion with Hardner about not understanding the technology.

So, this means that the tin foil hatters were correct again. The FBI and other security agencies can access the encrypted data one way or another. So now that that cat is let out of the bag, it almost means that encryption does not matter one bit. Don't forget they can crack it easier than any of us can, simply because they if they can use a 'super computer' of some kind to crack it.

Now Apple wants to know how the FBI did it , and they are not sharing that information with Apple.

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