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autotldr Bot ,

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Just two days after the attempted assassination at former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, the FBI announced it “gained access” to the shooter’s phone.

Cooper Quintin, a security researcher and senior staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that law enforcement agencies have several tools at their disposal to extract data from phones.

The bureau famously butted heads with Apple in late 2015 after the company refused to help law enforcement get around the encryption on the San Bernardino, California shooter’s iPhone.

Early in the following year, Apple refused a federal court order to help the FBI access the shooter’s phone, which the company said would effectively require it to build a backdoor for the iPhone’s encryption software.

“The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor,” Cook wrote.

Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the Pensacola shooting was one of the last times federal law enforcement agencies loudly denounced encryption.

The original article contains 1,208 words, the summary contains 180 words. Saved 85%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

henfredemars ,

Easier is a very relative term. It’ll be really expensive to use a genuine zero-day to do it. Such exploits are few and far between.

dwindling7373 ,

How is it expensive? It is if it eqates to the zero day becoming of public domain, and this is not the case here. They can say they guessed the password while in fact they exploited some unknown vulnerability…

henfredemars ,

Zero days are extremely expensive costing in the millions of dollars even if you’re not publishing exploit details. Just using it is extremely costly because each attempt exposes your bug to the world, which is an opportunity that it could get caught and patched. Android and iPhone both have mechanisms to detect and report crashes which could easily cost you your bug. Plus, on the exploit markets, a bug that hasn’t been used is worth more because there have been literally zero days of opportunity to defend against it.

There is definitely a cost to using something that expensive and that requires a necessary level of risk. You’ve got to be worth it, and the supply of such bugs is extremely low and sometimes zero depending on your exact software version.

SineNomineAnonymous ,

to be fair to the incompetent people in law enforcement, I do believe “trying to kill a presidential candidate slated to win and being a millimeter away from getting it done” would justify relying on a 0-day.

henfredemars ,

Indeed. That’s a pretty motivating reason.

dwindling7373 ,

Yes except we are talking about the government of the USA? Markets law are warped in this context. Do you think they sell those? To who? To what purpose, finance healthcare spending? The phone may call home and have things patched? You think they are unable to prevent a phone to call home?

What?

henfredemars ,

It is not as simple as you imagine. Sometimes a specific bug requires the device to think it’s online and providing this illusion is not perfect. You don’t just plug it in and push a button and you’re good unless perhaps you’ve got a really good bug. Often times, hitting the precise code area required to exploit a bug involves weird scenarios. For example, you might have to talk to the base station for the cell phone tower that can properly authenticate first before you can attack a bug. Sometimes, the bug involves an interaction between multiple phones. It’s not just some magic signals you sent down the cable necessarily. You have to hit the weird behavior. Most trivial stuff exposed over USB has been examined thoroughly. You need to get creative to find more attack surface. There are bugs like that, but you are mistaken if you think categorically there is not risk in exploiting some bugs that can break into a phone. Sometimes it’s trivial to ensure information about your bug is contained. Sometimes it’s not.

The money isn’t a concern about greed or actually making cash. The money reflects the value and scarcity of these bugs. With that said, yes they sell the exploits. Usually, the people who find the bugs are the ones doing the selling. There’s actually an entire market that exchanges this information if you know the right people. As an obvious example, mercenary malware contains exploits for these bugs. These are organizations like NSO group that buy and sell the information that you would use to do this.

catloaf ,

But known exploits that have been patched, but not applied because they didn’t update their phone, are plentiful enough.

Update your phones. Reboot them regularly, too.

henfredemars ,

This is true, but becoming an increasingly less important factor because devices now ship with automatic updates enabled by default.

Personally, if I had to guess as someone who studies exploits for a living, I’d wager the device isn’t the most recent model and is probably a few years old, so there are likely known unpatchable bootrom or firmware bugs that can be used from their private arsenal without having to risk an actual zero day exploit.

Chozo ,

Without knowing how they got into his phone, this is a non-story that is just a retelling of older stories. For all we know they just took his dead finger and put it on the reader. Or maybe he used the same 4-digit PIN for his debit card or lock box or something else that they were able to recover. Maybe some detective just just randomly entered the shooter's birthday, only to say "Hey sarge, you're never gonna believe this... first try!"

There's nothing useful that can be taken away from this story yet, until more details come out.

glowie ,
@glowie@h4x0r.host avatar

Or unknown NGO software was used. But you’re right. A nothing burger for now.

Eggyhead ,

I’m super curious how they got into his phone

admin ,
@admin@lemmy.my-box.dev avatar

I think you’ll get to hold on to that feeling.

SineNomineAnonymous ,

“We tried 0000. Tony, write up a press release about how incredible we are at our job and how we spent 400% of our usual overtime on it and send it to the tech press. Make sure they mention we need to triple next year’s budget for security and shit.”

0x0 ,

they just took his dead finger and put it on the reader.

My bet’s on this.

xnx ,

Using a dead persons finger is not possible though

Chozo ,

I don't see why it wouldn't be. It just checks that the shape of the fingerprint is there, it doesn't check for a pulse or any sign of life. If you have a high-enough resolution image and printer, it's actually rther trivial to bypass most optical fingerprint readers.

SineNomineAnonymous ,

Exactly. The article doesn’t shy away from a bit of free publicity for Cellerite. Which is nowhere near as much of a magic bullet as the “tech media” makes it out to be.

How do I know it? By doing the most basic of research by heading to their website and looking at their manuals and documentation.

And Cellerite won’t tell you this publicly because their bottom line depends on their ability to massively overprice their services which they sell to technically illiterate people.

Any article that mentions Cellerite without a caveat about the dubiousness of their publicity can be disregarded and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

randomaccount43543 ,

Do they say what phone it was?

LodeMike ,

Yeah my guess is some shitty android.

WallEx ,

Oh, a shill in the wild.

LodeMike ,

No, a shitty android (as in one that has a security flaw in it). I use Android lol.

WallEx ,

Yeah, like an old IOS on an old iPhone, that doesn’t get updates anymore?

sugartits ,

Brand new phones don’t get updates sometimes. reddit.com/…/zte_says_there_is_a_chance_the_axon_…

LodeMike ,

That too.

piracysails ,

Guys I think they meant from a bad OEM.

LodeMike , (edited )

I did and I said that. A shitty android. If I meant to say that all android are shitty I would have just said “must’ve been an android”

Edit" apparenyly “mist-ve” is more of a word than “must’ve” according to my keyboard.

TheReturnOfPEB ,

Our local sheriff is using some spy level shit in our county that he refuses to explain.

He keeps “happening” upon crimes just “on accident.” yesterday it was “stopped to take a pee in public park and caught a baddie” and two days before that it was “just happen to follow and pull over a guy with lots of pounds of pot hidden in the car.”

The US police are spying on Americans phones, internet, GPS, and everything with no judicial recourse because it is corporations spying and then “giving the info” to the police for money.

The US law enforcement has gone full STAZI but using capitalism as additional cover.

The US is dead.

rottingleaf ,

Let’s all apologize to Stallman.

demonsword ,
@demonsword@lemmy.world avatar

the man has rarely been proven wrong in anything tech related he has said

TimeSquirrel ,
@TimeSquirrel@kbin.melroy.org avatar

Good thing you put the "tech related" qualifier on there. He probably should have stayed in that lane.

TheGrandNagus ,

Indeed.

It’s also a reminder of why we shouldn’t mindlessly celebrate celebrity figures like they’re deities.

Stallman has amazing views regarding FOSS, but yeah, some of his other opinions are… interesting.

absGeekNZ ,
@absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz avatar

This made me think of Jordan Peterson…some of his early stuff on actual psychology was interesting and informative…then there is all the other stuff, you had a lane stay in it.

But I guess very minor celebrity can go to someones head and make them do crazy things. /s (damn you Poe’s law)

humorlessrepost ,

He should’ve cleaned his own fucking room.

I will say his recent interview of (by?) Alex O’Connor was spectacular, though.

corsicanguppy ,

Let’s all apologize to Stallman.

For the twice a day that broken toe-jam-eating watch is right?

remer ,

“on accident“ 🤮

corsicanguppy ,

“on accident“ 🤮

I know. Who SAYS that? It’s by accident. One doesn’t plan these things.

Asidonhopo ,

'Round here we say “with accident” or “of accident”, thank you

PrimeMinisterKeyes ,

As the old and venerable neuromonkey once said:

Welp. Just let the nukes fly, then. First it’s “on accident,” and before long you’ve got meth addicted baby prostitute warlords running the local Walmart.

phoenixz ,

Mind telling us which sherrif this is?

Lumisal ,

I think it’s the one in New York named Spyder Mann

xnx ,

Do you have an article on this?

USSEthernet ,

They’re probably just capturing SMS messages or regular calls. Which is still illegal without a warrant, but who watches the watchers? Use encrypted chats and encrypted calls if you’re worried.

Maggoty ,

That’s also a red flag for a dirty cop getting information from criminal group A to go after competition.

You should probably move.

0x0 ,

The article does mention Cellebrite.

umbrella ,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

stingrays, people.

they sell the exploits and are all hush hush about it.

GamingChairModel ,

Stingrays don’t do shit for this. That’s mostly real time location data focused in by tricking your phone into reporting its location to a fake cell tower controlled by an adversary. That doesn’t get into the data in your phone, and even if someone used the fake tower to man in the middle, by default pretty much all of a phone’s Internet traffic is encrypted from the ISP.

The world of breaking disk encryption on devices is a completely different line of technology, tools, and techniques.

umbrella ,
@umbrella@lemmy.ml avatar

stingrays can compromise a phone through modem exploits, and pull data from there.

though not all of them are made equal, they are an entire category of devices.

GamingChairModel ,

Oh damn, just read about these baseband exploits. Ok, you’ve changed my mind.

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

IMSI catching is a different thing.

But yes, exploits are sold by gray hats rather than by white hats and closed. The NSA is supposed to be on top of this, but instead of closing exploits, they keep them to enhance their anti-terror spying, which they then trickle out to US Law Enforcement, especially if there’s loot (liquid assets) that are easy to seize.

Law enforcement in the US is mostly a highway robbery racket.

anlumo ,

I’m pretty sure it used to be easier with phones that didn’t have full disk encryption.

bdonvr ,

Good chance it was just putting the dead dudes finger on the scanner lmao

xnx ,

Not how that works

bdonvr , (edited )

Unless disabled by timeout, restart, or otherwise manually I’m curious to know why that would be?

Of course the dude had to know this was a one way trip, I’d have wiped everything but then again maybe they didn’t care at that point.

willsenior ,

It is hit or miss. The fingerprint button is also looking for the electrical signals of a living person. Apparently, that doesn’t end immediately upon death.

BigFatNips ,

Source? Sounds like scifi movie stuff to me, but I’d be interested to read/see more about it

CoolGirl586 , (edited )

Your body doesn’t all die at once. The parts that need a constant flow of oxygen die within minutes, while some parts take hours. Tissues like skin, tendons and heart valves are viable for harvest for as long as 48 hours after death.

australian.museum/…/decomposition-body-changes/

I don’t know how long a fingerprint would work after death though. I imagine it depends on the type of scanner. An optical scanner would probably not care. I’m not sure about ultrasonic. Thermal and capacitive would probably stop working within minutes of death.

BigFatNips ,

Lol not that. I’m well aware of that. I meant a source for “fingerprint readers are looking for an electrical signal too” as I’m very sure I’ve heard about them being defeated with a high enough quality reproduction of the finger (read: not flesh at all, let alone alive)

CoolGirl586 ,

Oh, I did a dumb. Capacitive readers use the body’s natural electrical signal to form an image of your fingerprint. You can trick them by using something conductive and running the right amount of electricity through.

Dead people don’t work though. Not for very long at least.

Grippler , (edited )

Capacitive sensors are looking at capacitance of a material, everything has this not just living things and it certainly doesn’t require putting current through the material. You can for example get capacitive sensors for sensing the presence of cardboard, and they’re often used for detecting metal parts (obviously tuned to the specific material). This is also why water droplets mess up touch screens (and the biometric sensor), because it’s close enough to the capacitance of a finger (we’re mostly water after all) to trick it and create false triggers.

piecat ,

Capacitive sensors don’t measure the body’s signals. Capacitance is a physical property of a material. The sensor puts out a signal and measures the response.

I can use a gallon of milk to scroll my phone. Just tried.

willsenior ,

mashable.com/…/smartphone-biometrics-dead-body-to…

Might be outdated, though

ArcaneSlime ,

Eh so you stick a 9v to the back of the finger, whatevs.

Asidonhopo ,

Hit him with a TENS machine then

KingThrillgore ,
@KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml avatar

Wiping isn’t a 100% thing with either Hard disks or Flash. He should have thrown everything into a wood chipper. And yes, this absolutely has to be a one way trip. Either they get you, or you turn the gun on yourself. Nothing good will come of you surviving.

sturmblast ,

Don’t do illegal things on your phone :)

dumbass ,
@dumbass@leminal.space avatar

YOU’RE NOT MY SUPERVISOR!

ivanafterall ,
@ivanafterall@lemmy.world avatar

THAT’S MY PURSE! I DON’T KNOW YOU!

TheGrandNagus ,

Just because of that I’m gonna do illegal things even harder

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Good luck with that. The CFAA was written when Reagan was spooked by Wargames in 1982. If you violate any TOS of websites you use (very easy to do) it can be prosecuted as a federal felony with a maximum sentence of 25 years imprisonment.

If the police really want you to disappear into the penal system, they’ll make it happen. And they do, routinely.

sfxrlz ,

Paid by everybodies taxes™️

chemicalwonka ,
@chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Can they access Pixel 8 with GrapheneOS? I think not

UnsavoryMollusk ,

Depends, is your bootloader unlocked ?

chemicalwonka ,
@chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

Locked and USB-C Off on firmware level

Grippler ,

It shouldn’t be when using graphene OS, the installation guide even instructs you to lock it after you’re don’t installing it.

UnsavoryMollusk ,

Interesting, I know some phone reset to stock when relocking it

Sam_Bass ,

Sif that hasnt been the case for 20 years? Heh

uriel238 ,
@uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It’s always a contest between security tools and penetration tools. The problem comes when law enforcement can do this without fair protections of privacy, say if they can easily establish probable cause ( My detection dog is signalling you have illegal data on your phone ) or they are allowed to get a warrant post-hoc for an otherwise illegal search.

…Or they do the illegal search and then engage in parallel reconstruction e.g. make a fake story about following up on an informant.

Once the police just seize and crack your phone on a whim, then the state no longer respects your privacy and autonomy, which means you can no longer consent to be governed, rather are controlled by gunpoint (surveillance and use of force). This is one of the critical ingredients to autocratic rule, since it does a lot to neuter the capacity of discontent turning into revolt.

communism ,
@communism@lemmy.ml avatar

For GrapheneOS full disk encryption, am I correct in understanding that the disk is encrypted when my phone is locked and decrypted when I unlock it? So I don’t need to turn it off for it to be encrypted, as long as it’s locked it’s encrypted?

todd_bonzalez ,
@todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee avatar

The disk is encrypted when the phone is off, and it is decrypted after you turn it on and authenticate locally.

communism ,
@communism@lemmy.ml avatar

Thanks, that makes sense.

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