Research Reveals iOS and Android Encryption Weaknesses

Why Secure Containers Are Needed

The Research

iOS has solid encryption, there is no backdoor, hence, your firm’s data is safe under lock and key, correct?  Not necessarily. Enlightening new research by cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University (1) has surfaced weaknesses in the iOS and Android encryption schemes. Ironically, in the case of iOS, part of the weakness is related to a security hierarchy which is often unused.

“Apple provides interfaces to enable encryption in both first-party and third-party software, using the iOS Data Protection API. Within this package, Apple specifies several encryption “protection classes” that application developers can select when creating new data files and objects. These classes allow developers to specify the security properties of each piece of encrypted data, including whether the keys corresponding to that data will be evicted from memory after the phone is locked (“Complete Protection” or CP) or shut down (“After First Unlock” or AFU) …

… the selection of protection class makes an enormous practical difference in the security afforded by Apple’s file encryption. Since in practice, users reboot their phones only rarely, many phones are routinely carried in a locked-but-authenticated state (AFU). This means that for protection classes other than CP, decryption keys remain available in the device’s memory. Analysis of forensic tools shows that to an attacker who obtains a phone in this state, encryption provides only a modest additional protection over the software security and authentication measures described above.” (JHU – bold is our addition)

The reality is that most of our iPhones are commonly in “After First Unlock” state because we rarely reboot our phones. To achieve maximum security, we would have to power down our iPhones and authenticate after each use. That is, scores or hundreds of times per day. Otherwise, all data in the AFU state is vulnerable to law enforcement agencies or criminals with the right forensic tools. As the Hopkins researchers noted, “Law enforcement agencies, including local departments, can unlock devices with Advanced Services for as cheap as $2,000 USD per phone, and even less in bulk, and commonly do so.”

“There’s great crypto available, but it’s not necessarily in use all the time,” says Maximilian Zinkus, Johns Hopkins University. The Hopkins researchers also extended their analysis to include the vulnerability of iCloud services and device backups:

In an interview, Apple stressed that its goal is to balance security and convenience. The result: law firms and other enterprises who rely on iOS’ first-party apps (e.g., iOS Mail) may be unknowingly using an encryption scheme which does not meet their requirements.

Device owners may take actions to ensure greater security. Apple Insider cites a few user actions including: Use SOS mode; use the setting which locks iOS devices after 10 failed login attempts; and don’t use iCloud back-ups. But these user-optional mitigations are not adequate for enterprise security, and they don’t address the forensic techniques used to steal data in the AFU state. Enterprises need systematic approaches across all firm-managed devices.

Why Secure Containers Are Needed

Sophisticated attackers and government agencies have a variety of available tools at their disposable to extract sensitive data from a seized or stolen device. The preponderance of evidence shows that law enforcement is largely successful in cracking open a device and extracting sensitive information as needed. Evidence further suggests that these techniques are ported to even the latest iOS versions and devices (take a close look at https://www.grayshift.com/ – they offer the state-of-the-art in device forensics). What can you do to truly protect sensitive data? The built-in capabilities of the operating system are not sufficient.

Secure containers provide an additional layer of encryption by implementing an entirely independent encryption mechanism to protect data. To examine the protection offered by secure contain apps, we will refer to our LINK app in this discussion. LINK not only uses its own, independent encryption scheme, Link also uses its own built-in encryption technology. In other words, the LINK encryption software stands entirely independent from the operating system, regardless of whether that operating system is intact or compromised. As long as encryption keys are protected well, then secure containers can provide the kind of locked-down encryption that law firms want to protect email and documents, which encapsulate a large majority of a firm’s most sensitive data.

LINK’s data protection exceeds iOS in a few significant ways:

  1. LINK is an app, and iOS apps are routinely removed from memory. Hence, while LINK does necessarily keep encryption keys in memory when the app is active, once the app is removed from memory its encryption keys are too. This stands in contrast to iOS’ “AFU” encryption.
  2. LINK allows IT to identify data that is only accessible when the device is online. This makes it awfully difficult to get the encryption keys for that data, especially once the device has been identified as lost or stolen and flagged for a remote wipe.
  3. LINK’s online encryption keys are really hard to guess. Offline keys are hard to guess too, as long as your organization uses complex A-D passwords. Online keys are not derived from a user’s passcode or even a user’s A-D password. LINK’s encryption keys are derived from randomized 32-character strings that are generated on the LINK servers using entropy available on the server. Brute-forcing the key derivation is unlikely to work, which means an attacker would have to compromise the LINK Controller that sits safely inside our customers’ networks, then break the encryption scheme protecting sensitive data stored in our Controller database. Getting LINK data is a lot more complicated than stealing or seizing a mobile device.
  4. LINK aggressively limits the amount of data available on the device, online or offline. We do so by simply expiring away data that sits unused on the device. This is a really simple way to limit exposure without much practical impact on a user. Users can always go back to their email (via search) or to the document management system to find what they were working on. There is no practical reason to store lots of old, unused data on a device that is easy to steal and, as it turns out, compromise once stolen.
  5. LINK’s data is useless when obtained from an iCloud backup or a local backup to a Mac device. LINK’s encryption keys are never backed up. An attacker’s best hope is to brute force both the iOS device passcode and the user’s A-D password before IT notices that the device is lost or stolen. This is incredibly difficult to accomplish given Apple’s built-in protections against brute-forcing passcode and given a reasonably complex, hard-to-guess A-D password.

The JHU research simply reminds us that Apple’s interests diverge widely from those of an individual law firm. Apple has to balance the needs of law enforcement and users to make data accessible while still providing a reasonable degree of protection. Law firms’ best interests lie in maximally protecting data against unauthorized access. In order to achieve this latter goal, Apple’s built-in technology simply won’t suffice.

-Seth Hallem

Seth Hallem is the CEO, Chief Architect, and Co-Founder of Mobile Helix, makers of the LINK App. With LINK professionals can review, annotate, compare, and email files, as well as use the firm intranet, using a single secure container app. www.mobilehelix.com


References:

  1. “Data Security on Mobile Devices,” Maximilian Zinkus, Tushar M. Jois, and Matthew Green, Johns Hopkins University.
  2. “How Law Enforcement Gets Around Your Smartphone’s Encryption,” Lily Hay Newman, Wired.
  3. “Many iOS Encryption Measures ‘Unused,” Say Cryptogographers,” Hartley Charlton, MacRumors.
  4. “Apple encryption is a balance between user convenience and total security, new study shows,” Wesley Hilliard, AppleInsider.

Is Your Data Safe? The Challenge of Client-side Security for Law Firms

Our CEO, Seth Hallem, spoke at the NetDocuments executive summit, ndElevate 2017, on May 23rd.

Seth’s presentation focused on three actionable ways for law firms, and any enterprise, to protect client-side data. We are sharing his slides from ndElevate below. If you have any comments or questions, we’d welcome hearing from you. Please write to contact at mobilehelix.com.

Thank you to NetDocuments for an excellent summit!

 

 

Mobile Helix at iManage ConnectLive, May 11-12

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Security Reigns in Legal Tech

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“ILTA’s 2015 Technology Survey Published: Security is King, Queen and Pawn” – Jobst Elster, InsideLegal

 

Security is on the minds and the agendas of Legal IT teams. It’s no wonder. The Legal profession is no different than the rest of the business world. Experian, Trump Hotels, Ashley Madison and the FBI are just a few of the organizations to suffer from major data breaches in 2015. Continue reading

Crossing Things Off Your To-Do List and Staying In Control While Mobile

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Now that we understand why it is so difficult to be productive while mobile, in this third post we turn to a potential solution to this frustrating problem.

For several years now, enterprise software has been designed and built to run inside the corporate firewall, accessible from any web browser inside the company network. This made things so much easier – easier for IT to manage and deploy a single installation rather than software on every desktop, easier for a user to be able to use a company desktop, later a company laptop, and now a personal laptop or computer from home.

Those same systems that are so much more connected and convenient than software on our desktops are preventing our mobile devices from being more useful. Mobile devices can’t easily connect to portals and file repositories behind the corporate firewall. The result is that all those systems must be redesigned to work for mobile. So, how can I access the information that I need to cross things off my to-do list when I am mobile?

Redesigning existing systems is costly, complicated and is not feasible for most IT organizations. Fortunately, there is a better way to expose internal systems to mobile devices with a lot less work and effort. Two technologies, when combined, yield the desired functionality without complete rewrites. The first is secure containerization and the second is HTML5.

Secure containers have been in use for several years and are a natural evolution of MDM (Mobile Device Management). MDM enabled IT to lock down an entire device, monitor its location at all times, and even wipe all contents remotely – including any personal apps, pictures, and videos. A secure container enables IT to control just the corporate data on a mobile device, including the ability to wipe and to set policies on its use, without sacrificing personal privacy. This is good for security and is the first part of the solution. However, to be really useful, the container must also provide access to the suite of applications needed to complete the everyday game of Tetris that is our to-do list.

Enter HTML5 – the technology that is already powering many web based portals behind the firewall. With an HTML5 container, accessing internal resources – whether they are documents in a DMS, a corporate intra-net portal, SharePoint, or other web-based technologies becomes much easier.

An HTML5 container is a native app that provides core functionality like offline access and push-notifications. Enterprise web apps run securely inside the container. Very little rewriting is needed, HTML5 is more portable and future proof than native code implementations for mobile. Most IT teams have a good understanding of HTML5 and are able to write apps using it quickly and easily. Many existing apps that run on the corporate intranet run inside an HTML5 container unchanged. In addition, existing legacy systems like Exchange 2003 and SharePoint 2003 have well documented web-based APIs to access them, making it easy for new web apps to be written on top of legacy systems for mobile use.

The world has gone mobile. Now it’s time for corporate systems to catch up. Let me access my files from my mobile phone without sacrificing security. Let me grab a document from DMS and email it to a client over lunch. Let me quickly take an internal attachment, rename it, and send it to an external client while enjoying a cup of coffee. Enable me to get valuable tasks done whenever I have time instead of later when I’m at the office. Let me get more small inter-dependent tasks done on the go – much like I can quickly turn, twist, and move shapes in Tetris. Then I can get more rows cleared from my to-do list and have more time and more patience for my kids.

Thank you for reading. Please comment below and tell us what you think. We would love to hear your thoughts.

Ilya

Containerization and Securing the Data

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Last week I attended a session of IT professionals which posed the question, Is MDM Enough?

The three panelists were in CIO and Managing Director roles. Each one was currently using a respected Mobile Device Management solution which he or she had licensed 2 or 3 years ago. To a person each one said, “If I were to do again now, ‘containerization’ would be the focus.”

This illustrates the state of enterprise mobile security today. BlackBerries were generally company property. It was understood that the company could wipe the BlackBerry. Then firms issued iOS and Android devices to certain employees. It was during this phase that MDM had its heyday. Securing devices became the objective. The response was a tactical one, install MDM. Companies were initially on firm ground in requiring that employees use a password on the device and in wiping the entire company-owned device should it be lost or stolen.

But the landscape changed rapidly with employees eager to work from their own personal iOS and Android smartphones or tablets. Requiring MDM to be installed on personal devices and requiring that a password be entered before an employee could use his or her own phone to make a personal call was overreaching. And wiping a personal device is a questionable practice. Not surprisingly, employees pushed back.

Leaders in the field saw that attempting to secure the device was the wrong approach and that what was needed was to secure the corporate data. A few innovative firms developed an approach which is broadly called containerization.

What is containerization? In its most advanced case, containerization is the creation of an encrypted sandbox on the mobile device for the secure access of corporate resources. In some cases, there is provision for storage of files within the secure container. The user must authenticate to access the secure container. There may also be offline access to files and email. The container itself can be remotely wiped by the company, but not the entire device. In fact, there are no restrictions on the personal usage of the device – no device password is required; there are no rules about what can be installed on the device.

Containers are not created equal. Features and architectures vary. We stake a claim on having unsurpassed security. For example, the encryption code for our Link Container is written in native code. It does not use the native OS security API. Our container remains secure even on a rooted or jail-broken device.

There is more to our secure container offering, including full endpoint administration, role-based access and analytics. We are just an email away – we would be happy to show you the full picture.

– Maureen