No, the CIA isn't stealing Apple's secrets

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://blog.erratasec.com/2015/03/no-cia-isnt-stealing-apples-secrets.html

By Robert Graham
blog.erratasec.com
March 10, 2015

The Intercept news site by Glenn Greenwald is activism rather than 
journalism. Their stories don't reference experts knowledgeable about 
subjects, but only activists who are concerned about the subjects. This 
was demonstrated yet against in their piece claiming "The CIA Campaign to 
Steal Apple's Secrets". Yes, the Snowden documents are real, but pretty 
much everything else is made up.

Here's the deal. Terrorist leaders use iPhones. They are a status symbol, 
and status symbols are important to leaders. Moreover, since Apple's 
security is actually pretty good, terrorists use the phones for good 
reason (most Android devices suck at security, even the Blackphone). 
Getting software onto terrorist's phones, or basebands, is an important 
goal of intelligence.

When CIA drones bomb a terrorist compound, iPhones will be found among the 
bodies. Or, when there is a terrorist suspect coming out of a dance club 
in Karachi, a CIA agent may punch them in the face and run away with their 
phone. However, it happens, the CIA gets phones and wants to decrypt them.

Back in 2011 when this conference happened, the process of decrypting 
retrieved iPhones was time consuming (months), destructive, and didn't 
always work. The context of the presentation wasn't that they wanted to 
secretly spy on everyone's phones. The context was that they wanted to 
decrypt the phones they were getting.

[...]



--
Evident.io - Continuous Cloud Security for AWS.
Identify and mitigate risks in 5 minutes or less.
Sign up for a free trial @ https://evident.io/