Feds Want To Search Apple Watch

08/03/2017

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In at least one federal case, the government has sought to search an Apple Watch.

That should be of little surprise: according to the first person to jailbreak the wearable tech, it doesn't have the same levels of hardware security as the iPhone but contains much of the same data, from text messages to location information.

For reasons that are unclear, the cops in that one case, involving a drug trafficking investigation in Ohio, weren't able to execute the warrant for an Apple Watch Series 2. The cops issued separate search warrants for an iPhone and the Watch of a suspect. They sought to gain access to the phone by forcing the fingerprint of the suspect onto the TouchID sensor to unlock iOS. A document detailing the execution of that warrant said data was successfully acquired, though didn't say how. No such luck with the Watch, however. The Department of Justice declined to comment on the case as it was an ongoing investigation.

Feds Want To Search Apple Watch

But what's clear, from that case and another warrant obtained by Forbes that unsuccessfully sought to acquire information from an unnamed pink and black smart watch, is that the feds are seeking access to wearables. And the latest research into the security of the Apple Watch might be of use to them.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of his work was the effort it took to analyse the kernel of WatchOS, a necessary step in determining how to launch exploits on the system. Though the wearable's operating system is similar to iOS, it's not exactly the same, meaning some deeper knowledge of its internals is required, Bazaliy explained. To get a better understanding of the kernel, the researcher had to crash the device using one of the vulnerabilities used in the NSO attack, which would then leak just four bytes of the kernel. He had to get up to 700 bytes before he had enough to launch his attacks, a process that took two weeks of repeated crashes, thanks to the five minutes the Apple Watch took to recover from each failure.

But it's still proof there are ways around Apple Watch's protections. And it might be useful for cops wanting to acquire data from the tech giant's increasingly secure hardware.

Source: forbes