Border Control Agents have been issued with devices that can copy the entire contents of your cell phone in a few minutes - the entire contents, using JTAG, of every storage device onboard.

If you've got bits encrypted, great - but there's a lot of stuff you can't encrypt in iOS and Android, in general, unless you work really hard at it ..

Don't know why this was downvoted.

http://www.cellebrite.com/mobile-forensic-products/ufed-touc...

This device, advertised to law enforcement agencies, plugs into the phone (or sometimes connects by Bluetooth), exploits it, recovers deleted data, and copies all your texts, contacts, browsing history, GPS history, etc. to a flash drive for the operator. If it's an iPhone it can't exploit, the operator can copy some plists from your iTunes library (which you'd also have with you at a border crossing) onto the device, bypassing the PIN.

Locking your phone or deleting data is pretty much worthless if you're trying to hide from well-equipped law enforcement agency.

I've worke for a few companies that make these products.

They largely depend on public exploits. If you have a fully up-to-date iOS device the odds are lower that someone using one of these kits can image it without a passcode. The companies that make these kits are really dumb and employ bottom-of-the-barrel developers that aren't really capable of writing good code, let alone finding jailbreak-type bugs in mobile stuff.

They also don't have the money (or the contacts) to buy the bugs, so, stick to phones that can't be jailbroken and you're probably safe against these imagers...

Sorry, but no. You may be correct about the incompetent developers of these devices, but the truly competent developers simply use JTAG and do a block-by-block NAND/Flash transfer. There is no protection against this.

the iphone doesn't have a live jtag, does it? you can only use the jtag interface on hardware if the hardware is cooperating (by design) with you, it isn't a magic wand you can wave and get everything... additionally, ios does on-flash encryption of the data partition and you need the phone online to read it (or to get the key), so even if you could get some magical jtag port to give you up all the blocks that store user data, it would be encrypted...

There are debug pins exposed on the standard iOS connector, yes - they may not be 'full JTAG' but they are there for manufacturing and testing purposes, and accomplish pretty much the same thing as you would normally use JTAG.

And yes, you can do a full block copy - with the cooperation of the OS - if you know the back door. A lot of these Border Patrol devices depend on it.

As someone who wrote multiple iOS jailbreaks, the above post is entirely incorrect.

(1) It is almost certain that JTAG is not exposed on an iPhone, as this would be a massive and obvious error on Apple's part, though I do not actually have proof of this.

(2) No type of debug interface is exposed via the dock connector, as this would also be a massive security hole. Rather, as previously stated, imaging software uses exploits, often for bugs previously found by jailbreakers and since patched. (Note that people have used the kernel debugger over the serial interface on some dock connector pins, but only as a convenience after exploiting the kernel to enable this functionality. It is normally disabled.)

(3) A raw block copy of the NAND is useless, because the data is encrypted using the UID key hidden in the hardware AES engine.

(4) Even if you get an exploit running, some information (sensitive information minus the information that's required for operation while locked) is encrypted with the passcode. You can bruteforce the passcode, the process of testing a particular passcode requires using the aforementioned UID key, which you can only ask the hardware AES engine to encrypt and decrypt things with, not actually retrieve. Therefore, without some really powerful hardware attacks, bruteforcing must be conducted at a fixed rate on the phone itself, rather than offline on a compute cluster. If you use a 4 digit passcode, this isn't much help, since it doesn't take long to try 10,000 possibilities, but a good password will take a long time to bruteforce.

Not perfect - among other things, as previously mentioned, you're screwed if they also have the computer you sync the phone with - but not bad.

See: http://images.apple.com/iphone/business/docs/iOS_Security_Oc...

That makes sense. I'm guessing this is why the forensics company has a procedure for lifting some sort of key out of the paired iTunes library to get access to the device without the PIN.

I should add that these aren't primarily border control devices. Legitimate use-case would be searching a phone seized in an arrest after obtaining a wiretap order for it. They police end up using them to read your entire digital life as long as an officer says that, in his judgement, you may have been texting while driving.

Yeah doesn't really make a lot of sense at the border. Nobody is going to deliberately bring any device with incriminating content over the border, not when you can easily get a new phone and laptop at WalMart for a couple of hundred bucks.

Overkill. Cross borders clean. I reset my phone every time I cross any border. And then resync everything I need on the other side. I have a TrueCrypt volume I download to my travel laptop. It's small but contains what I need when abroad.

The US has outlawed encryption in the past, and tools they once touted as promoting democratic freedom in oppressive regimes are suddenly seen as evil, so you'd probably need to remove all signs of TrueCrypt on your laptop as well.

Sorry, but I fail to see how an app locking you out is more overkill than wiping all of your devices every time you cross a border.

Depends on what you mean by overkill. Effort? Then yes. Security? Then no. If the data is there but inaccessible you can be detained until it is. If the data isn't there to begin with, there's no reason to detain you.

I'd call that more of an effectiveness thing than overkill. And it would be possible for an app to not unlock the phone until it enters a certain geofence, like the hotel.

That wouldn't work in the UK, where not providing plain text when asked carries a prison sentence.

The app wouldn't accept a password, just a time and location to unlock. I'm not sure if that's better, but it technically sidesteps that issue.

I said plain text, not password. And it doesn't side-step anything because when you're in front of a judge and explain why you cannot provide plain text, they'll take your phone from you, get it to the location you tell them, and if none of that yields plain text, you go to jail. Two years, they give you for that.

Who has gotten two years for that and lost the appeals?

That only applies if there's a court order to reveal the data, not at random border checks.

I think it reads better if "overkill" above is seen as an imperative verb, as in "I suggest you overkill." :)

Unfortunately they still might ask you to fire up your laptop, give the password, find the truecrypt volume and then ask you the password for that.

Sorry, my post was a bit sparse on detail. I keep a TC volume (file) on three separate public file shares. My laptop is clean. I download and install TruCrypt, and download the TC volume once I'm through customs. When I say clean, I mean that there's no trace of anything on any of my devices while I cross a border. That means there's no TrueCrypt, and no TrueCrypt volume on my laptop at all. Why should there be? We have the Internet.

Of course, after they have your personal details, they'll now do an Internet search and find this post. You just gave them your game plan ;)

Indeed I did. But how would anyone prove that this scenario isn't just hypothetical?

well done sr

You can use a TrueCrypt hidden volume for that. Fill up a normal volume with some plausible data and use the hidden volume for your actual files.

http://www.truecrypt.org/docs/hidden-volume

If they were actually on you, they would find the hidden volume too.

You've crossed a lot of borders before, haven't you, mixmax? I thought about this proposal of yours for a while as I was eating breakfast, and I remember the ways that tangible property of travelers can be handled at a border.

First of all, if a particular kind of tangible property is declared to be contraband by some country, it can be seized at the border. There is nothing you could do about that, if you want to visit that country, except not bring along the property.

Another treatment of some kinds of property is charging a tariff, even if the property will remain in the traveler's possession after leaving the country. I have seen this done. Some items carried by Americans were dutiable in Taiwan even if they were not items that would be sold in Taiwan. (This was in the 1980s.) The customs duty for some items, by the tariff laws Taiwan then had, were equal to the full retail price of the items (mostly consumer electronics, as in the case I observed).

Or the property could be held in bonded storage at the airport until you finish your journey. That happens for some items in some countries too.

To sum up, just because you can lock your phone doesn't mean you will be able to travel around the world with your phone. Try that in North Korea. Try that in some other places, and see what happens. Countries can control the entry of tangible property into their territory if they so choose.

I think that @mixmax was mostly referring to the US border.

That will result in two things: you will be detained further, and they will seize your device.

> That way you won't be able to divulge information held on your phone, even if you wanted to.

Bad. If you have nothing to hide, this will make it look like you have, and now you're in deep shit.

From the stories I'm reading lately, chances are that if you answer with such non-sense (sorry, I can't access the information in MY OWN PHONE) they will have someone from border control beat the information out of you.

Haha, you can do that already. Disable that feature that restores your phone after x number of failed passcode attempts, and keep inputting wrong passcodes until it's locked for x hours.

I don't think it has an upper bound but I could be wrong.

I'm pretty sure the cap is one hour and even if its not if he wanted to lock it for 5 hours he would have to wait 1 hour to try again and then 2 hours and then 3, etc.

The cap is not 1 hour ... it is MUCH much longer. At one point I had gotten ahold of my friends phone while he was passed out drunk. He slept pretty much all day, every time the counter ran out, we locked it again. He ended up having to wait 18 hours to finally get to it, since he didn't have his computer with iTunes on it with him.

He'd get text messages/calls and he wouldn't be able to answer them!

That's hilarious. I allways though the cap was 1 hour because that was the furthest I had gotten before my sister saw me locking her phone :).

So they just have to confiscate the phone?