On 02/17/2016 05:39 PM, John Robinson wrote:
If this is so then why all the fuss?
Let's get a little technical about what the FBI wants.They want to look at the private information on an iPhone 5c found in possession of a dead terrorist. Their plan is to randomly try passwords until they get lucky. The problem is iOS does several things to make this difficult. First, iOS puts in an escalating delay after every incorrect guess, making it harder to make lots of guesses as time passes. Second, there is a security setting that can be made to brick the phone after ten incorrect guesses; this may not be turned on, but nobody knows, unless the phone can be cracked.
The FBI wants Apple to write a special version of iOS containing none of these security features. Only Apple can write such an operating system because it must be signed by Apple's secret keys in order to be installed.
After they get the new operating system installed, they still have to guess the correct password. If the terrorist used a numeric 4-character password, which many people do, it would take only a few seconds to discover the password because there are only 10,000 possibilities. But, if the terrorist were only a little bit paranoid and used a random alphanumeric password of ten characters or more, there are at least 839,299,365,868,340,224 (= 64^10) possibilities. At 1000 guesses per second, it might take a million years to stumble on the password.
By the way, such a hacked iOS would apparently not be possible with 6-series phones because Apple has built a "security enclave" into the A8 chip that powers them. The 5c has an A7.
There's no doubt the FBI knows all this. They've been wanting the ability to read all our stuff for a long time, and they've carefully chosen this case to make an example of Apple. Their whole legal argument is based on an obscure law from 1787 and they're using this "crisis" to prod Congress into passing the law they really want.
If Apple caves in here, then they'll have to do the same for any other government that requests the same custom version of iOS.
This is a crisis that affects the whole computer industry. Where are Google, Microsoft, Samsung, Oracle and all the other tech giants? I don't hear much from them.
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