Comments on: Access files on locked, encrypted Android phones by putting them in a freezer for an hour

By: jimmoffet

jimmoffet — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 07:17:00 +0000

Default disk encryption is to protect you from meddling by not particularly talented law-enforcement.

If the guys who want your stuff have access to a digital forensics lab run by the CIA, you will probably want to use something a little stronger.

By: jimmoffet

jimmoffet — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 07:12:00 +0000

Don’t forget using a task killer to empty your discretionary ram on screen off. Otherwise, anything stored in ram (recent websites, etc…) are still accessible.

By: Gulliver

Gulliver — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 06:58:00 +0000

Well, you see, a physicist, a cryptographer and a Java developer walk into a bar and all say, “I’ll have a cold one.”

The bartender balks, “You haven’t paid your tab from your last fetch-execute cycle, I’ll need to hack some collateral this time.”

The physicist says to the cryptographer, “Give her your iPhone,” but the cryptographer replies, “And void my $100 service plan? You’re nuts!”

So the physicist turns to the Java developer and says, “Give her your Android.”

The developer asks, “Where’s your phone,” to which the physicist says, “I left it in a parallel joke.” So the developer sighs, “What the dev hell, I voided the warranty fifteen minutes after activating it anyway.” He encrypts it, hands it to the bartender and says, “Don’t lose it.”

She replies, “I’ll put it somewhere safe.”

By: niktemadur

niktemadur — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:01:00 +0000

Plus the fact that I’m truly baffled at just how they come up with such incredibly abstract methods to do something like this.

By: niktemadur

niktemadur — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 00:53:00 +0000

half as much and halfway there.
I was going for a Pythonesque thing there, c’mon:
“If you had half as much watching this show as we had making it, then we had twice as much fun as you did.”

By: DIIIIIIVE!!

DIIIIIIVE!! — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:54:00 +0000

And twenty years ago this was already being done to car radios to reset their codes.

By: Gulliver

Gulliver — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 07:32:00 +0000

Right, because getting seven billion violent apes to live in harmony and cracking a cellphone’s encryption are clearly problems in the same league. And the erosion or civil rights has nothing to do with human rights abuses antithetical to World Peace (TM). I guess all those Middle-Eastern peoples who whine about Western corporations obsequiously betraying them to the murderous regimes they’re trying to overthrow should really just shut the fuck up, because niktemadur wants privacy activists to focus on more important things!

Come on, niktemadur, I know from watching your comments here that you know better than that.

By: niktemadur

niktemadur — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 04:52:00 +0000

Jeez, if these people would put half as much focus, ingenuity and effort into achieving World Peace than they do into these challenges, we’d be halfway there by now.

By: DooMMasteR

DooMMasteR — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 04:30:00 +0000

you actually can do eactly that :)
unlock (wipes the phone)
flash some custom rom
and then lock again… also make sure you have a recovery installed that checks for signatures in update packages…
and selfsign all updates with your selfdeployed key
at least on the GN that is no reaproblem

By: eldueno

eldueno — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 00:44:00 +0000

Its about time someone was able to do this.

By: BillGlover

BillGlover — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 23:28:00 +0000

I think in this case they are relying on the key being retained in memory from the last decryption. (The phone is on, but locked when they start). If they pull the battery for long enough for the memory to lose its contents, they lose the key.

By: Rock Hardwood

Rock Hardwood — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 23:10:00 +0000

There HAS to be a test-jig you can get that powers up a board at just the right spots, so you can control things better. Pull the battery, ship it off to Langley or local digital forensics lab, fit it to jig, do the magic, email dump to client.

Seems a more reliable method than guesstimating thermal properties and allowing the device to manage it’s own boot.

By: Kimmo

Kimmo — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 23:06:00 +0000

Coolest.

Hack.

Ever.

By: timquinn

timquinn — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 22:33:00 +0000

I wonder who funded this research?

By: SomeDude

SomeDude — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:56:00 +0000

On the downside, scrambled telephones are a a nightmare for IT forensics and law enforcement

Um, law enforcement can lick my balls, thank you very much.

By: kingluma

kingluma — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:39:00 +0000

it’s even easier than that on Samsung Galaxy S 3 ;
http://www.zdnet.com/bug-allows-complete-lock-screen-bypass-on-samsung-galaxy-s-iii-7000012173/

By: Alexander Borsi

Alexander Borsi — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:37:00 +0000

And new feature in KLP: RAM heater. A 15w strip of nichrome wire kept running at all times.
Battery life MIGHT be affected.

By: Michael Smith

Michael Smith — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:28:00 +0000

No good against my kuang mark grade 11 icebreaker virus.

By: planettom

planettom — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 21:13:00 +0000

http://i22.photobucket.com/albums/b344/planettom/lj2011/im-in-ur-elevators-hurting-ur-magnum-pis.jpg

By: Fred Swetland, IV

Fred Swetland, IV — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 20:02:00 +0000

You…you just made a ‘Runaway’ reference. You are awesome.

By: unaboomer

unaboomer — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:39:00 +0000

Desktop platforms have been known susceptible to this type of attack for years: https://citp.princeton.edu/research/memory/
If someone has that much access to your phone/system you’re gonna be in trouble anyway.
This is why you should always let Ramsay keep some of the circuit templates so Luther cant get them even if he catches you.

By: ldobe

ldobe — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:25:00 +0000

scrambled telephones are a a nightmare for IT forensics and law enforcement

Cry me a river. They can track our phones just fine without decrypting them anyway. That’s bad enough already. I guess I’ll have to think about ways of making my phone self destruct now.

By: Al Billings

Al Billings — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:22:00 +0000

Of course this works in principle. This was demonstrated with laptops a couple of years ago and even covered here.

http://boingboing.net/2008/07/19/cold-boot-encryption.html

By: jhhl

jhhl — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:21:00 +0000

ICE WIlliam Gibson, NEUROMANCER

By: technogeekagain

technogeekagain — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Given that “cold boot” has another meaning already, color me a bit skeptical about this scenario. OK, yes, maybe one can muck up the clocks enough by freezing the heck out of the thing to enlarge a timing window enough to exploit it, but I’d be more than slightly surprised.

By: technogeekagain

technogeekagain — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:00:00 +0000

Or getting a wifi palmtop, and getting a phone, and not trying to shove ten pounds into a five-pound bag.

By: eain

eain — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:45:00 +0000

@Ryan- True. Which is frustrating for a number of OTHER security reasons. Is it possible to unlock a bootloader, load a new ROM, and then RE-lock the bootloader?

By: oasisob1

oasisob1 — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:43:00 +0000

Or for sticking with your old Nokia dumbphone.

By: Ryan Singel

Ryan Singel — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:39:00 +0000

This is the first good argument I’ve ever seen for manufacturers locking down the bootloader.

By: Ryan Kiefer

Ryan Kiefer — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 18:35:00 +0000

This attack only appears to easily work against phones with a user-removable battery, as there isn’t any other easy way to quickly reset an Android phone if you can’t pop the battery out. So devices like the Nexus 4 are slightly more guarded. (Though a determined attacker could still partially dissemble the device, rendering this moot.)