Saturday, July 21, 2018

Defending the iPhone Restricted Mode

Recently, Apple introduced restricted mode to protect iPhones from attacks by companies like Cellebrite and Greyshift, which allow attackers to recover information from a phone without the password or fingerprint. Elcomsoft just announced that it can easily bypass it.

There is an important lesson in this: security is hard. Apple Computer has one of the best security teams on the planet.
This feature was not tossed out in a day, it was designed and implemented with a lot of thought and care. If this team could make a mistake like this, imagine how bad a security feature is when implemented by a team without this kind of expertise.

This is the reason actual cryptographers and security engineers are very skeptical when a random company announces that their product is "secure." We know that they don't have the requisite security expertise to design and implement security properly. We know they didn't take the time and care. We know that their engineers think they understand security, and designed to a level that they couldn't break.

Getting security right is hard for the best teams on the world. It's impossible for average teams.

The Emerging WPA3

Everyone is speaking about the new WPA3 Wi-Fi security standard, and how it improves security over the current WPA2 standard.
Here is the gist is as good as any other:
The first big new feature in WPA3 is protection against offline, password-guessing attacks. This is where an attacker captures data from your Wi-Fi stream, brings it back to a private computer, and guesses passwords over and over again until they find a match. With WPA3, attackers are only supposed to be able to make a single guess against that offline data before it becomes useless; they'll instead have to interact with the live Wi-Fi device every time they want to make a guess. (And that's harder since they need to be physically present, and devices can be set up to protect against repeat guesses.)
WPA3's other major addition, as highlighted by the Alliance, is forward secrecy. This is a privacy feature that prevents older data from being compromised by a later attack. So if an attacker captures an encrypted Wi-Fi transmission, then cracks the password, they still won't be able to read the older data -- they'd only be able to see new information currently flowing over the network.
Aware that we're just getting the new standard upcoming week. Actual devices that implement the standard are still months away.