Getting Around Smartphone Encryption

Being discussed, security and how it is being circumvented.

How Law Enforcement Gets Around Your Smartphone's Encryption

in Wired, Lily Hay Newman,  January 15, 2021

Analysis by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) cryptographers revealed encryption-circumventing schemes that law enforcement agencies use to access information in Android and iOS smartphones. JHU's Maximilian Zinkus said iOS has infrastructure for hierarchical encryption, yet little is actually used. The researchers found vulnerabilities in the iPhone's After First Unlock security, triggered after users unlock their phone the first time after a reboot; encryption keys begin getting stored in quick access memory even as the phone is locked, at which point a hacker could find and exploit iOS bugs to grab keys that are accessible in memory, and decrypt big chunks of data from the device. Reports from Israeli law enforcement contractor Cellebrite and U.S. forensic access firm Grayshift indicated most smartphone access tools probably operate in this manner. Android phones lack a Complete Lock mechanism after first unlock, meaning forensic tools can steal even more decryption keys, and compromise more data.  ... ' 

Our Relationship with AI

Wired Launches a new podcast: Sleepwalkers, in the post below with links to it. Will be listening to and following. Posting comments here.

Rethinking Our Relationship With Artificial Intelligence
A podcast series examines AI and its influence on humans. 
Artificial intelligence now shapes our lives in profound ways, curating social media posts that drive us apart, determining who gets a loan or probation, and even helping choose our romantic partners.

This week, WIRED is launching Sleepwalkers, based on a series of podcasts that examine the AI revolution.

The first episode, available here, examines how AI manipulates and exploits us. It asks what kind of a future are we letting the technology build and offers some ideas for what to do about it. Host Oz Woloshyn discusses the sway that AI has over us with several experts trying to understand technology’s influence and to unravel where we may be headed.

Tristan Harris, who once worked on technological persuasion at Google, now runs a think tank called the Center for Humane Technology, where he worries about AI’s power to seduce and manipulate us.

“We’ve basically got 2 billion humans completely jacked into an environment where every single thing on your phone wants your attention,” Harris says. “Their incentive is to calculate ‘what is the perfect, most seductive thing can I show you next?’”   ... " 

Wired Predicts

Wired Predictions for Bots, Blockchains, CrispR and more ..

SOMETIMES THE FUTURE shows up so fast it hits us in the face, like a brick wall in a VR headset. Other times the miraculous promises of technology—the rearrange­ment of our very DNA, the blockchain-­enabled toppling of Facebook—are frustratingly slow to arrive. But either way, the future is coming, and we should be ready. In the following pages we lay out a series of predictions, starting with some changes that are immediately upon us. Then, looking down the road, we get ever-bolder in our prognostications, year by not-so-far-off year. —The Editors