Technologies the company has adopted protect Apple customers’ content so well that in many situations it’s impossible for law enforcement to perform forensic examinations of devices seized from criminals. Most significant is the increasing use of encryption, which is beginning to cause problems for law enforcement agencies when they encounter systems with encrypted drives.
“I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab at the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section in the Department of Justice, said during his keynote address at the DFRWS computer forensics conference in Washington, D.C., last Monday. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”
Apple encryption is so good, not even DOJ can crack it
DOJ < NSA 😉
Too bad Apple gives access to your data to criminals so easily that encryption doesn’t really matter.
If you are referring to Mat Honan’s hacker, he couldn’t access data on the encrypted disk either. Even with your iCloud password, you can’t decrypt the disk. You need the account password (not the AppleID password) and physical access to do it.
It’s still worrying to read such high praise of Apple’s alleged security in the wake of that disaster. Chain, weakest link, and all that.
Jim has already admitted that Apple screwed up in resetting the password for Mat’s hacker. I agree too. Apple screwed up big time.
But “weakest link, and all that” only applies if you’re talking about the same chain. This is a different chain. Knowing your iCloud username and password only gets you access to data in iCloud. It does not get you access to data on the Mac’s hard disk, which is what this article is about. For that you need a password that Apple’s employees do not even know, and thus, could not even give out if they wanted to.
Data in iCloud and data on a Mac’s hard disk is becoming increasingly synonymous. Surely Apple doesn’t want to make that distinction any more. As far as they’re concerned, they want you to put everything in the cloud. They don’t even want you to have to think about where exactly your data is. It’s always there, on all your Apple devices.
I’ll give you that, for someone who has his hard disk encrypted and who uses iCloud sparingly, the Honan threat isn’t particularly…threatening. But since Apple is making a point of wanting us to use iCloud for all our document storage, that data is at risk no matter how good the local encryption might be. Same goes for any other cloud service of course, not just Apple’s.
I replied below, forgot the click the right reply button. Duh me.
Agreed – we do have to be careful with what we trust to iCloud, or any cloud. And it will get even more fuzzy for novices.
It’s just nice to know that when we make the effort to store it on the desktop, it is reasonably well protected.
I have a lot of thoughts concerning this link.
And I have my own opinions as to why Jim linked to this article, however, I think I wouldn’t have linked to this story.
Notwithstanding Apples’s encryption robustness, it’s a cussing shame Ovie Carroll can’t keep his cussing mouth shut!