Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack

Re:Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack by wongarsu on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @07:00PM (#11171281)

>If the Secure Enclave can be updated on a locked phone, all they need to do is stop allowing that, right?

That probably also means removing most debugging connections from the physical chip, and making extra sure you can't modify secure enclave memory even if you desolder the phone.

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Re:Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack by tptacek on Wednesday February 24, 2016 @07:23PM (#11171435)

A lot of that stuff was already in the original threat model for the Secure Enclave ("assume the whole AP is owned up").

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Re:Apple Is Said to Be Working on an iPhone Even It Can’t Hack by twistedpair on Thursday February 25, 2016 @05:35AM (#11173561)

No one has been talking about the fact that you can rebuild transistors on an existing chip. It's very high tech stuff, the sort that Intel uses to repair early engineering samples painstakingly, but it is used.

You decap the chip to expose the die with HF, and then use Focused Ion Beams and a million dollar microscope setup, you can rearrange the circuits. So, if the NSA absolutely had to have the data on the chip they could modify it to make it sing. So, if say they know an iPhone had the location of Bin Laden on it, they could get the goods without Apple.

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