The DOJ has withdrawn from their battle to force Apple to unlock an IPhone from the San Bernadino shooting. As I had mentioned earlier the US Dept of Justice had botched the investigation in the first place making it nearly impossible to unlock the Iphone. Then the government restored to scare tacticts and security hype trying to force Apple into a bad PR time to make them back down. That failed miserably. The DOJ then said it needed a delay because it may have found a way to get into said Iphone. Now the DOJ has dropped its case altogether claiming they had found a way into the phone. Given the governments recent trend of either using scare tactics or outright threats usually coupled with outright fabrications make me wonder if the DOJ truly got into the phone or if this is them trying to damage the reputation of Apple in retaliation for Apple daring to stand up to them. I can think of a couple of ways they could have done it..but I highly doubt they broke the encryption but if the DOJ found a way to image the NAND memory and then brute forces the image that is one way to do it. If that is the approach taken that’s a side channel attack and there’s not much that can be done. Of course the DOJ is not revealing what they did…and they really are not under any obligation to do so. I can bet folks at Apple are freaking out right about now. One major point of vulnerability in the IOS system is the phone boots WITHOUT needing input from the user which means the key is stored somewhere in plaintext for the phone to use at boot time. At least on my Nexus I can enable the ability to require the pin to even boot. We may never know how the Iphone was compromised but there’s two ways to do it right there..:)
