FBI cracks phone belonging to Trump rally shooting suspect

MicroWave@lemmy.world to News@lemmy.world – 291 points – FBI cracks phone belonging to Trump rally shooting suspect
theguardian.com

Federal investigators are analyzing device’s content, although it is unclear how agency gained access

The FBI has gained access to the phone of the suspected gunman who opened fire on Donald Trump’s rally and is analyzing the device’s contents, the agency stated in a press release on Monday afternoon. The shooting, which killed one audience member and left Trump bleeding from one ear, is being investigated as an assassination attempt.

Authorities have been working to determine the motive behind the attack at Trump’s campaign rally on Saturday, but no clear picture has yet emerged. The gunman, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks by the FBI, was shot and killed in the incident.

Federal investigators announced on Sunday that they had obtained Crooks’s cellphone, but had issues with bypassing its password protections to access the data within. FBI investigators then shipped the phone to a lab in Virginia, where agents successfully gained access, per the bureau’s press release.

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Something sus about how quickly they can unlock phones when it's attempted murderer killed dead and murder victims killed dead.

Cracking a phone is pretty doable. Cracking phones in a way that will hold up in a court trial, much more formal.

look into celebrite

I think there's videos on youtube.

they can plug in most phones and have access to everything through an easy gui

I would definitely not call Cellebrite an "easy GUI" and they definitely don't get into most devices. Ive seen devices take months to unlock, if ever.

Cellebrite machines were used to copy contacts and messages and call logs from one phone to another, back in the day before Android and iPhone. There was little to no security on dumb phones back then... and you still needed the customer to put the PIN in and unlock their phone before using the Cellebrite. They came with a million different kinds of USB -> phone proprietary adapters, because mini and microUSB hadn't bee adopted yet as a standard.

Source: I used to do this sort of thing on a Cellebrite.

Most phones are locked with a four digit numerical PIN. The current technique is taking an image of the flash memory, and reflashing the memory after every few attempts.

It still takes a bit longer than straight brute force without a temporal lockout, but it’s still pretty trivial.

If it was biometric login, even easier. Would've gotten in before thebody even got cold.

15 years ago, yes, nowadays especially on iPhone this does not work at all

It does when you have physical access to the RAM and storage, and a disassembly lab expressly configured for this purpose.

This is the backbone for a number of forensic services offered to law enforcement, and an entire cottage industry. I know with certainty it was still feasible as of the iPhone 12, which is well inside of 15 years. I don’t believe the architecture in the 13 or 14 has changed significantly to make this impossible.

With slightly earlier phones, tethered jailbreaks are often good enough, though law enforcement would more likely outsource to a firm leveraging Cellebrite or Axiom as the first step.

No, it doesn’t. This is what the Secure Enclave is for.

You’re not storing these counters in system memory. You’re sending attempts to an isolated chip.

Yes, it does, if they have full access to the disassembled hardware and assuming research time & resources they could do practically anything. Such as emulating the Secure Enclave chip with a “fraudulent” version, changing all firmware running on any semiconductors in the phone, isolating storage, I don’t know the details, but let your imagination loose.

Physical, uninterrupted access is unlikely, yet bad news for anyone’s threat model.

not only physical access, but the authority to get any information necessary from the manufacturers of every component in the device. there is no question to them how any component operates, from silicon to software.

If it used face unlock, just have the dead body and prop the eyes open and you’re in?

If I remember right, samsung/iphone face unlock won't work on a corpse since it relies (at least in part) on infrared constellations that incorporate patterns formed by subdermal capillary networks and death obviously disrupts those.

At the nation-state level with an ex-president target, pumping heated liquid through the arteries of a dead body isn't much of an obstacle.

Probably not actually what they did, but seriously people - a single biometric security factor is not going to secure anything when a government has the body and actually cares about getting in.

That’s very interesting if true! I didn’t realize it could be that advanced.

I shouldn't have, but I smiled.

I should clarify: I meant that if they're law enforcement does the killing, cracking the phone takes much less time than it does when the phone belongs to the murder victim.

Dude... my niece can unlock my phone while i sleep by putting my finger on the sensor.

I wouldn't be surprised if it would recognize my face while sleeping too

iPhones require your eyes to be open and looking at it, so I imagine Androids have something similar.

I sleep with my eyes mostly open... but the point is, that i am sure that the FBI are more creative than my niece