Over the past couple months, I have been volunteering at the Iowa Area Education Agency installation near my school. It's been an interesting experience, a blend of volunteering and job shadowing.
The task was to aid in the continued construction of their deployment systems. Deployment is, in essence, the process of taking a completely blank computer and installing an OS and programs on it over the network with a minimum of human assistance. The AEA already had a very nice system in place with the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, organized based on the makes and models of the target systems. I brought in my school's laptops so that the AEA could add appropriate configuration to their library and so that my school could benefit from the setup.
We ran into several challenges, most of which stemmed from the fact that the first laptop I brought had a bad hard drive. I did get to learn a lot about MDT troubleshooting and driver registration because of that, though. We'll next be moving on to Office installation; we've already made some progress on that.
Thursday, February 25, 2016
Thursday, February 18, 2016
What exactly the FBI wants Apple to do
There's a lot of talk and media attention on the FBI's request for Apple to help break into the phone of a terrorist. There's also a lot of confusion and misleading information surrounding that whole debacle, which I would like to clear up.
The phone's contents are encrypted on its storage medium. That makes the request different than a simple unlock - just moving the storage device to a different reader wouldn't help. There's no backdoor, and no "master key" that Apple can use to decrypt anybody's data. The encryption key is derived from a password, but guessing passwords really quickly wouldn't work because the storage controller would slow down the requests and eventually destroy the data after too many failed attempts. Picking apart the storage medium and circumventing the controller would likely result in the destruction of the data because the physical medium is so tiny and delicate.
Therefore, the FBI is asking Apple to create an alternate program ("firmware") for the storage controller that would allow rapid guessing and eventually decryption. The FBI can't make it themselves because they don't have Apple's firmware-signing key; the updated firmware wouldn't be accepted without a valid signature.
Apple doesn't want to give the FBI a signed alternate firmware because the FBI and the government could use it on other devices to invade the privacy of non-terrorists. So far, they've defied the court order.
Related reading: Cryptography wins
The phone's contents are encrypted on its storage medium. That makes the request different than a simple unlock - just moving the storage device to a different reader wouldn't help. There's no backdoor, and no "master key" that Apple can use to decrypt anybody's data. The encryption key is derived from a password, but guessing passwords really quickly wouldn't work because the storage controller would slow down the requests and eventually destroy the data after too many failed attempts. Picking apart the storage medium and circumventing the controller would likely result in the destruction of the data because the physical medium is so tiny and delicate.
Therefore, the FBI is asking Apple to create an alternate program ("firmware") for the storage controller that would allow rapid guessing and eventually decryption. The FBI can't make it themselves because they don't have Apple's firmware-signing key; the updated firmware wouldn't be accepted without a valid signature.
Apple doesn't want to give the FBI a signed alternate firmware because the FBI and the government could use it on other devices to invade the privacy of non-terrorists. So far, they've defied the court order.
Related reading: Cryptography wins
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