And Now The Game Is Afoot

This is an interesting situation — and one to watch.

Apple will fight a federal magistrate’s order to help the Obama administration break into an encrypted iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in last December’s deadly San Bernardino terror attack.

In a statement posted on Apple’s website early Wednesday, CEO Tim Cook said the order by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym “has implications far beyond the legal case at hand.”

“We have great respect for the professionals at the FBI, and we believe their intentions are good,” Cook’s statement read in part. “Up to this point, we have done everything that is both within our power and within the law to help them. But now the U.S. government has asked us for something we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to the iPhone.”

What the FBI wants is a means to defeat the “auto-erase” feature present on all newer devices if you guess the password wrong too many times.

Newer devices, including those from BlackBerry and Apple, contain an encryption key piece that is buried in the hardware of the device.  This key component cannot be accessed until it is unsealed, and the unsealing requires the device’s password.

That password and the key component together form the necessary pieces of the key to then decrypt the device.  But to prevent brute-force attacks the phone’s software is set up so that if you get the key wrong a certain number of times (typically 10) in a row the data is automatically wiped, including the user component of the key (the password.)

The FBI knows that a properly-designed composite key (and we’ll assume this one is) cannot be forcibly extracted from the device; the chips involved are built that way on purpose, with most going to so far as to embed the physical chip die around a means of preventing electron microscopes from penetrating the area where the data is stored and if you attempt to disassemble the chip to get around that you’ll destroy it.  The government’s own security models depend on this; were it not present the Chinese or Russians could steal a government phone, hack the composite key and…. Bob’s their uncle.

This Judge is an idiot — a dangerous idiot.

Her intentions are good, but the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  Once such a firmware version exists there is no means possible to prevent it from being distributed and used; it will get beyond the boundaries that are allegedly set for it (witness Hillary’s lawless email server for an example that went on for years and still nobody has gone to prison) with no possible way to shove that Genie back in the bottle.

Mathematically-strong encryption rests on the premise that nobody can break it.  As soon as you introduce the ability to violate that the security of every device using it, now and forever, rests on the premise that you have absolute control of that tool.

That is never true — it never has been in the history of man and it never will be because people are fallible; not only do they screw up they can be coerced or bribed.

I’m no fan of Apple but Tim Cook is right, and irrespective of any such order the firm should refuse — even if it means moving Apple, and himself, out of the United States.