What the FBI is asking Apple to do

Here’s a link to the court order from Judge Sheri Pym (officially, she is a Magistrate Judge for the United States District Court for the Central District of California), ordering Apple to:

assist law enforcement agents in enabling the search of a digital device seized in the course of a previously issued search warrant

That device is an iPhone 5C, seized as part of an investigation into the December 2, 2015 San Bernardino shootings.

The order goes on to say:

Apple’s reasonable technical assistance shall accomplish the following three important functions: (1) it will bypass or disable the auto-erase function whether or not it has been enabled; (2) it will enable the FBI to submit passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE for testing electronically via the physical device port, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or other protocol available on the SUBJECT DEVICE; and (3) it will ensure that when the FBI submits passcodes to the SUBJECT DEVICE, software running on the device will not purposefully introduce any additional delay between passcode attempts beyond what is incurred by Apple hardware.

So far, sounds like the FBI wants a way to brute force step through all possible passcodes electronically. This is a backdoor. Which means once this technique is released into the wild, bad actors can do the same to your phone.

The order then goes on to say:

Apple’s reasonable technical assistance may include, but is not limited to: providing the FBI with a signed iPhone software file, recovery bundle, or other Software Image File (“SIF”) that can be loaded onto the SUBJECT DEVICE. The SIF will load and run from Random Access Memory (“RAM”) and will not modify the iOS on the actual phone, the user data partition or system partition on the device’s flash memory. The SIF will be coded by Apple with a unique identifier of the phone so that the SIF would only load and execute on the SUBJECT DEVICE. The SIF will be loaded via Device Firmware Upgrade (“DFU”) mode, recovery mode, or other applicable mode available to the FBI.

There’s more, but you get the gist: Backdoor, backdoor, backdoor.

One final bit from the court order, worth noting:

To the extent that Apple believes that compliance with this Order would be unreasonably burdensome, it may make application to this Court for relief within five business days of receipt of the Order.

That’d give Apple until Tuesday to respond. Stay tuned for Apple’s official response, coming next.