Good reminder to also set up something that does this automatically for you:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46526010

I actually think it is fitting to read about a government agency weaponized by an unscrupulous billionaire going after journalists working for an unscrupulous billionaire on an unscrupulous trillionaire owned platform.

There are trillionaires?

Being held in contempt at least means you got a day in court first. A judge telling me to give up my password is different than a dozen armed, masked secret police telling me to.

That's a very unusual and narrow exception involving "foregone conclusion doctrine", an important fact missed by Ars Technica but elaborated on by AP: https://apnews.com/general-news-49da3a1e71f74e1c98012611aedc...

> I believe secrets are still encrypted at this stage similar to cold boot.

Does this mean that the Signal desktop application doesn't lock/unlock its (presumably encrypted) database with a secret when locking/unlocking the laptop?

I really wish Apple would offer a pin option on macos. For this reason, precisely. Either that, or an option to automatically disable touchid after a short amount of time (eg an hour or if my phone doesn't connect to the laptop)

There's only ten possible guesses, and most people use their thumb and/or index finger, leaving four much likelier guesses.

Also, IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that if law enforcement has a warrant to seize property from you, they're not obligated to do so immediately the instant they see you - they could have someone follow you and watch to see how you unlock your phone before seizing it.

0.1 in itself is a very good odd, and 0.1 * n tries is even more laughable. Also most people have two fingers touchID, which makes this number close to half in reality.

75 footnotes for 89 sentences, nice! I guess that's how they roll over at the HLR.

It's something you know vs. something you have. That's how the legal system sees it. You might not tell someone the pin to your safe, but if police find the key to it, or hire a locksmith to drill out your safe, it's theirs with a warrant.

It's interesting in the case of social media companies. Technically the data held is the companies data (Google, Meta, etc.) however courts have ruled that a person still has an expectation of privacy and therefore police need a warrant.

When they arrest you, they have physical control of your body. You're in handcuffs. They can put your fingers against the unlock button. You can make a fist, but they can have more strength and leverage to unfist your fist.

There's no known technique to force you to input a password.

Compelled speech is protected, fingerprints aren't.

Imagine it's 1926 and none of this tech is an issue yet. The police can fingerprint and photograph you at intake, they can't compel speech or violate the 5th.

That's exactly what's being applied here. It's not that the police can do more or less than they could in 1926, it's that your biometrics can do more than they did in 1926. They're just fingerprinting you / photographing you .. using your phone.

The fifth amendment gives you the right to be silent, but they didn't write in anything about biometrics.

"technicality" or "loophole" is probably the word.

I fully agree, forced biometrics is bullshit.

I say the same about forced blood removal for BAC testing. They can get a warrant for your blood, that's crazy to me.

Serious question. If I am re-entering the US after traveling abroad, can customs legally ask me to turn the phone back on and/or seize my phone? I am a US citizen.

Out of habit, I keep my phone off during the flight and turn it on after clearing customs.

Did you know that on most models of iPhone, saying "Hey Siri, who's iPhone is this?" will disable biometric authentication until the passcode is entered?

In case anyone is wondering: In newer versions of MacOS, the user must log out to require a password. Locking screen no longer requires password if Touch ID is enabled.

Everyone makes this same comment on each of these threads, but it's important to remember this only works if you have some sort of advance warning. If you have the iPhone in your hand and there is a loaded gun pointed at your head telling you not to move, you probably won't want to move.

Or squeeze the power and volume buttons for a couple of seconds. It’s good to practice both these gestures so that they become reflex, rather than trying to remember them when they’re needed.

Alternately, hold the power button and either volume button together for a few seconds.

And threats aren't illegal. They can put a gun to wife's head and say they're going to shoot. It's up to you then to call their bluff.

Plausible deniability still works. You enter your duress code and your system boots to a secondary partition with Facebook and Snapchat. No such OS exists.

I'll bite. Why is it so terrible? I'm browsing this site right now on my phone and don't see the horror.

I think that ship has sailed.

In addition to what the other person who replied said, ignoring that iOS/Android/iPadOS is far more secure than macOS, laptops have significantly less hardware-based protections than Pixel/Samsung/Apple mobile devices do. So really the only way a laptop in this situation would be truly secure from LEO is if its fully powered off when it’s seized.

The key in the desktop version is not always stored in the secure enclave, is my assumption (it definitely supports plaintext storage). Theoretically this makes it possible to extract the key for the message database. Also a different malicious program can read it. But this is moot anyway if the FBI can browse through the chats. This isn't what failed here.

That's a strong statement. Also imho it's important that we use Signal for normal stuff like discussing where to get coffee tomorrow - no need for disappearing messages there.

Not if she’s smart.

There was a story here the other day, bitlocker keys stored in your Microsoft account will be handed over.

Bitlocker isn't secure, for several reasons, that I won't get into on here.

breached

This was known, in the past, but if its relying on zero-days Apple & Google are, adversarially, attempting to keep up with and patch, my assumption would not be that pegasus is, at any time, always able to breach a fully-updated iPhone. Rather, its a situation where maybe there are periods of a few months at a time where they have a working exploit, until Apple discovers it and patches it, repeat indefinitely.

The nso group is on the entity list, so no western govt is using it. And it was never used to gain access to devices that they already had physical control over.

My recollection is the computers do by default ask the user to set up biometrics

I want to say that is generous of her, but one thing that is weird is if I didn’t want someone to go into my laptop and they tried to force me to use my fingerprint to unlock it, I definitely wouldn’t use the finger I use to unlock it on the first try. Hopefully, Apple locks it out and forces a password if you use the wrong finger “accidentally” a couple of times.

Could be a parallel construction type thing. They already have access but they need to document a legal action by which they could have acquired it so it doesn't get thrown out of court.

I think this is pretty unlikely here but it's within the realm of possibility.

> faulty fingerprint sensor

The fingerprint sensor does not make access control decisions, so the fault would have to be somewhere else (e.g. the software code branch structure that decides what to do with the response from the secure enclave).

There appear to be a relatively few possibilities.

* The reporter lied.

* The reporter forgot.

* Apple devices share fingerprint matching details and another device had her details (this is supposed to be impossible, and I have no reason to believe it isn't).

* The government hacked the computer such that it would unlock this way (probably impossible as well).

* The fingerprint security is much worse than years of evidence suggests.

Mainly it was buried at the very end of the article, and I thought it worth mentioning here in case people missed it.

RAM encryption doesn’t prevent DMA attacks and perofming a DMA attack is quite trivial as long as the machine is running. Secure enclaves do prevent those and they're a good solution. If implemented correctly, they have no downsides. I'm not referring to TPMs due to their inherent flaws; I’m talking about SoC crypto engines like those found in Apple’s M series or Intel's latest Panther Lake lineup. They prevent DMA attacks and side-channel vulnerabilities. True, I wouldn’t trust any secure enclave never to be breached – that’s an impossible promise to make even though it would require a nation-state level attack – but even this concern can be easily addressed by making the final encryption key depend on both software key derivation and the secret stored within the enclave.

I recommend reading the AES-XTS spec, in particular the “tweak”. Or for AES-GCM look at how IV works.

I also recommend looking up PUF and how modern systems use it in conjunction with user provided secrets to dervie keys - a password or fingerprint is one of many inputs into a kdf to get the final keys.

The high level idea is that the key that's being used for encryption is derived from a very well randomized and protected device-unique secret setup at manufacturing time. Your password/fingerprint/whatever are just adding a little extra entropy to that already cryptographically sound seed.

Tl;dr this is a well solved problem on modern security designs.

It also has various options to adjust the behaviour, from no blocks at all, to not even being able to charge the phone (or use the phone to charge something else) -- even when unlocked. Changing the mode of operation requires the device PIN, just as changing the device PIN does.

Note that it behaves subtly differently to how you described in case it was connected to something before being locked. In that case data access will remain -- even though the phone is now locked -- until the device is disconnected.

I have to warn you, it does get annoying when you plug in your power-only cable and it still nags you with the question. But it does work as intended!