Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in California released a ruling that concluded state highway police were acting lawfully when they forcibly unlocked a suspect’s phone using their fingerprint.
You can turn that and Face ID off on iOS by mashing the power button 5 times- it locks everything down.
⚠️ WARNING: On android, mashing the power button 5 times calls emergency services…
Not on my Pixel 6. 🤷♂️ It just does what I told it to do, namely to open the camera.
Edit: these are some Reddit down votes. I just didn’t know I had this feature, and I apparently have disabled it, but I don’t remember doing so. Oh well.
The article pretty plainly says the guy was coerced into entering his password. So the headline feels a bit manipulative.
The headline is click-bait. I honestly don’t know why people still read this crap.
No.
No.
I really think this depends largely on who you are and what you do with your phone. I have face recognition and fingerprint recognition both enabled on my phone. It’s good enough to prevent a thief from gaining access to my device, and if law enforcement asked, there’s nothing on my phone that could possibly be incriminating. Realistically, I’d have no issue just unlocking my phone and giving it to a police officer, although I do know well enough to always get a lawyer first. Biometrics add an extra layer of convenience; it’s nice to just look at my phone and it unlocks. My concern personally is more about someone stealing my phone and accessing my accounts than self-incrimination.
If I ever was going to put myself in a situation where I’d run afoul of the authorities, I’d leave my phone at home anyway.
Maybe don’t live in a fucking dystopia. The US is a police state and you have no freedom left.
You do have the delusion of it though. It may not be real but if you want it to be you can work hard for money that was never real to begin with.
The more of those Talisman you handle the more magick will save your life til your labor is done with.
Terrible article. Even worse advice.
On iOS at least, if you’re concerned about police breaking into your phone, you should be using a high entropy password, not a numeric PIN, and biometric auth is the best way to keep your convenience (and sanity) intact without compromising your security. This is because there is software that can break into a locked phone (even one that has biometrics disabled) by brute forcing the PIN, bypassing the 10 attempts limit if set, as well as not triggering iOS’s brute force protections, like forcing delays between attempts. If your password is sufficiently complex, then you’re more likely to be safe against such an attack.
I suspect the same is true on Android.
Such a search is supposed to require a warrant, but the tool itself doesn’t check for it, so you have to trust the individual LEOs in question to follow the law. And given that any 6 digit PIN can be brute forced in under 11 hours (40 ms per entry), this means that if you were arrested (even for a spurious charge) and held overnight, they could search your phone without you knowing.
With a password that has the same entropy as 10 random digits, assuming no further vulnerabilities allowing them to speed up the process, it could take up to 12 and a half years to brute force it. Make it alphanumeric (and still random) and it’s millions of years - infeasible within our lifetime - it’s basically a question of whether another vulnerability is already known or is discovered that enables bypassing the password entirely / much faster rates of entry.
If you’re in a situation where you expect to interact with law enforcement, then disable biometrics. Practice ahead of time to make sure you know how to do it on your phone.
Article doesn’t even mention PIN. Where are you getting this “advice”?
Also, don’t use regular passwords with random letters and numbers, they are really hard to remember and easier to crack if the password isn’t complex enough. Instead, use a passphrase with at least 5 words.
Is that safe though? After seeing that XKCD I also thought it would be a good idea but then read that using passphrases is even worse because brute force attacks often use dictionaries as well to test word combinations, so one should use scrambled characters, just long enough to resist brute force.
The XKCD comic uses the entropy of common words assuming an informed cracker is using the best tools at their disposal, that being a dictionary attack. That’s why the entroy per character of the passphrase is so low compared to that of the special character password, but the passphrase can be much longer because it’s easier to remember, so that’s what gives it its higher total entropy.
Explain XKCD goes into more detail about how the calculation was done: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/936:_Password_Strength
Or they make a copy of your phone, alphanumeric password and all, and just sit on it for ten years until quantum computers make solving the password a piece of cake.
You should assume that any device confiscated by authorities will be copied and broken into eventually. Treat all data on said device as if it’s already compromised.
Copying an iPhone isn’t as straightforward as you seem to think. Copying data from a locked iPhone requires either an exploit or direct access to the SSD / memory chips on the device (basically, chip-off forensics, which likely requires bypassing the storage controllers), and I assume the same is true for Android devices.
I’m not saying such exploits don’t exist, but local police departments don’t have access to them. And they certainly don’t have the capability to directly access your device’s storage and then reassemble it without your knowledge.
Now, if your device is confiscated for long enough that it could be mailed off to a forensics lab for analysis? Sure, then it’s a possibility. But most likely if they want your data that badly they’ll either hold onto your device, compel you into sharing the info with them, or try to trick you into giving it to them. Hanging onto your data without a warrant for over a decade is a high risk, low reward activity.
Your data’s more vulnerable to this sort of attack in transit.
Sucks to be american. Sucks to live in america.
Why would anyone?
This is a dumb question. Almost 50 million people live in Sudan where there’s an ongoing famine. 70 million people live in UK where mass surveillance is roughly state supported. Asking why 300 million people don’t just move is … stupid
The difference is that people from the US and UK are generally welcommed in other countries. People from Sudan have a much harder time being let into other countries
As tourists, sure. But getting a work visa/residence permit is not as easy as you think.
And second of all, what do you expect? An entire country to up an leave? That’s stupid beyond measure. Won’t that entire country elect the same government wherever else they end up in?
Further advice regarding civil disobedience:
LEAVE YOUR PHONES AT HOME. Write down some numbers in case you get arrested—or better yet, memorize them. There are journalists there for documenting. And there will be plenty of other people that don’t follow this advice. Leave anything they could use as leverage over you and your cohorts away. Don’t bring ID. Don’t bring anything except what you need for the action. It’s not worth the risk.
ETA: also, any of you with a new car? DONT DRIVE THAT SHIT TO ANY MEETING OR PROTEST. They’re spying on you. Don’t post about it. Don’t use any unencrypted messaging service to coordinate it—WhatsApp is not safe. Signal and probably some other less common ones are the only ones safe enough. Ride a bike there, stash it in a conveniently hidden spot. Bring a change of clothes, plan escape routes, plant the change of clothes either hidden on your escape route or wear them under your plain clothes. Cover tattoos. Leftist activists are not safe. And literally the rest of your life could depend upon how well protected you have made yourself.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/10/felony-charges-pipeline-protesters-line-3
So many states have pretty quietly passed laws to make you a felon for protesting. Even peacefully. And to make you a fuckin corpse. In the south especially, a few states were writing “go ahead, run over any protester in the road” laws.
Be smart. Be safe. Have a plan. Have a contingency plan. This isn’t “fuck around with the blunt end of the justice system and find out” territory, in 2024 US, it’s time to be as safe as you can while doing what’s right. Because doing what’s right is criminalized. Heavily.
If you’re going somewhere where you think you might be at risk, IMHO, it’s probably just easier to turn your phone off. Android and iOS both require a non-biometric passcode after boot.
Or, if you want to keep your phone on, enable lockdown mode on Android, or tap power 5 times on iOS to require a non-biometric password at the next unlock.
It’s never a good idea to bring your phone with you. It can be used, even while powered off, to track and surveil you. The BLM protests were just the tip of the iceberg. The apps you have on your phone track you. The government is buying that tracking data. Your phone is a massive privacy weak point. It’s basically a bug you carry on you willingly. It’s not safe. Period.
https://www.vox.com/recode/22565926/police-law-enforcement-data-warrant
Leave your phone at home. It’s not worth it. It may not bite you in the ass the day of, but could very easily come back to haunt you after they investigate, in case anything goes “wrong” in their eyes. It’s just not worth it.
IMHO, as someone that works in security / privacy, I tend not to view it as a binary thing. It depends on where you live, what you’re protesting, what you look like, who you are, etc.
Are you in Russia or China and are protesting the government? Yeah, I might leave that thing at home. Are you a white lady in San Francisco marching with a pink knit cat hat during brunch hours, then you’re probably well on the other side of the risk spectrum. You might actually be introducing more risk by having less immediate access to communication or a camera.
IMHO, it’s nuanced.
The problem is that the people doing the surveillance are hardly going around honestly telling people what’s their surveillance profile.
For example in the UK that “pink knit cat hat white lady” would very likely be under surveillance if she was a member of the Green Party and participated in demonstrations. In fact, recently a number of cases came out where in the 80s and 90s the police had infiltrated Ecologist groups and even left some of the women in those groups pregnant with the children of men they late found out were undercover agents.
Further, the lower the barrier to entry to surveillance the lower the “threat profile” needed to end up under surveillance: if the authorities have already have well established and commonly used processes backed by ultra-broad surveillance court (or whatever those courts are called in your country) orders to just get from the mobile network providers all the phone numbers that connect to specific cell towers during a specific time period (such as the ones nearer a demonstration during that demonstratiom), pink knit cat lady is going to end up in the list just as easilly as baclava-wearing hard-core anarchist looking to break stuff.
They might not hack the pink knit cat hat lady’s mobile to install eavesdropping software, but she’s still in the list for every demonstration she attended carrying her phone and for the authorities finding out those who were at multiple demonstration and cross-searching with other databases to resolve those numbers to actual identities is pretty easy unless those people jumped through hops to keep those things disconnected (which, funny enough, smart anarchists are more likely to have done than your average pink knit cat hat lady)
I agree with your point, but balaclava is the hat, baclava is the delicious Greek pastry.
I’ve avoided willingly using biometrics so far. Though I’m sure our faces, gaits, body shapes, etc, are all stored somewhere, willingly or not.
Say no to biometrics. It’s like having a password you can never change.
So, it really depends on your personal threat model.
For background: the biometric data doesn’t leave the device, it uses an on-device recognition system to either unlock the device, or to gain access to a hardware security module that uses very strong cryptography for authentication.
Most people aren’t defending against an attacker who has access to them and their device at the same time, they’re defending against someone who has either the device or neither.
The hardware security module effectively eliminates the remote attacker when used with either biometric or PIN.
For the stolen or lost phone attack, biometric is slightly more secure, but it’s moot because of the pin existing for fallback.The biggest security advantage the biometrics have to offer is that they’re very hard to forget, and very easy to use.
Ease of use means more people are likely to adopt the security features using that hardware security module provides, and that’s what’s really dialing up the security.Passwords are most people’s biggest vulnerability.
I’ve read all this before. If you believe the people who designed and implemented the device and its myriad layers of firmware and software were 1. All acting in good faith and 2. Knew WTF they were doing… then: yes, sure.
Unfortunately that’s way too many strangers for me. Hundreds of people design and code these things. Meanwhile, every week there’s a clever new breach somewhere.
If you’re that afraid if the people who build phones, why are you ok with using any device that can access the internet?
I like how being cautious with my biometric data is beung framed as irrational fear and paranoia. As if ID theft never happens.
Using biometric data to unlock your phone does not make you more vulnerable to petty criminals.
