Reply to post: Specious At Best, Wrong At Worst

Specious At Best, Wrong At Worst

When Trevor writes, "Apple is wrong is in saying that the FBI is asking for a backdoor. It isn't. ", he is misrepresenting the facts as I've seen them reported.

My understanding is: the Apple iPhone in question has been locked using the integral PIN locking mechanism. This has 4 digits and therefore 10000 combinations [0000-9999]. It also has a mechanism such that if someone enters the wrong value 10 times, the phone will wipe it's data. What the FBI are asking for, however, is a mechanism to obviate the "10 strikes" rule built in to the iPhone.

So let's go back.

Trevor wrote, "Apple is wrong is in saying that the FBI is asking for a backdoor. It isn't. ". Well, the FBI are asking Apple to alter the software on the phone to explicitly allow a brute-force attack. If we are to apply debating-society levels of pedantry [I exaggerate only slightly] then that's not far off the truth. But what the FBI are asking for, then, is for Apple to change the iPhone software such that *anyone* could keep working through the 10,000 combinations until they got lucky. Let's say that the FBI find a dexterous employee able to check PINs at the rate of, say, 1 every 5 seconds. That's 12 per minute, or 720 per hour.

In other words, the FBI is asking Apple to create a mechanism that would allow *anyone* [with reasonable dexterity and no concerns about RSI] to crack open an iPhone in approximately 14 hours.

Now let's compare that 14-hour crack with what we'd expect a typical supercomputer to do with current levels of US Government encryption standards. [ i.e. check and see what the NIST recommendations are].

Sorry, trevor, but in all reasonable interpretations, the FBI are asking Apple to *massively degrade* the security of iPhones. Now if you take a look at documents like this one:-

https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

from Apple themselves, you quickly see that the company has invested a great deal of time, money and effort into designing and delivering what they believe to be secure products. So just imagine the law suits that would emerge if Apple were to do an about-face and degrade iPhone security in this way. It would happen quicker than you can say "Class Action".

This aspect of your article is misleading, specious and inappropriate. Correction and retraction, please...