Top all-time · #4126
David Schuetz
Personal blog · darthnull.orgsecurityprogramming
David Schuetz writes Darth Null, a personal blog at darthnull.org about security and programming. Since 2015, 19 different Hacker News readers have linked it 19 times, most often “Ping Storms at GreyNoise”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-23, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (12) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link David Schuetz's blog as a reference on iPhone and iOS encryption, passcodes, and device forensics, and on 1Password internals. Commenters point to it when explaining how iOS file encryption works.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 12 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /2014/10/06/ios-encryption6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-05-24
- Ping Storms at GreyNoise2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-09-27
What Hacker News says?
The iPhone uses AES encryption which would prevent cloning the flash storage [1]. There was an informative discussion of this over on AppleInsider - http://forums.appleinsider.com/discussion/191851 [1] http://www.darthnull.org/2014/10/06/ios-encryption
Comment linking /2014/10/06/ios-encryption
on “A Message to Our Customers”Submitted Ping Storms at GreyNoise as a story · 74 points
HN discussionI don't mean to engage in whataboutism here, but unless you're under the impression that no tech company is privacy conscious, what you're saying isn't true (though that'd be a reasonable impression, to be fair). It's absolutely a security failure and it's not acceptable. But it's not a matter of "allowing" it to happen so much as, "Which vulnerability will we be caught by?" And it actually is a pretty normal vulner…
Comment linking /security/2014/03/10/cve-2014-1279-touchscreen/
on “Facebook Stored Hundreds of Millions of User Passwords in Plain Text for Years”Submitted Salt as a Service: Interesting approach to hashing passwords as a story · 13 points
HN discussionSorry about the slight OT, but what truth is there in this statement I was presented with? >Even if an iPhone is locked, all of that encrypted data can technically be read easily so long as the phone had at least been unlocked once since the time it was booted up. Obviously I think it's a nonsense, but I have no way of disproving it (even though the burden of proof is on the claimer, naturally). Edit: OK I found thi…
Comment linking /2014/10/06/ios-encryption
on “One of the FBI’s Major Claims in the iPhone Case Is Fraudulent”Submitted Network Traffic Analysis of ICMP "Love" Noise Storms as a story · 9 points
HN discussionSo are iOS devices that have a passcode and are running iOS 8, and with fingerprint scanning a lot more people have password locked devices. Good article on the subject is here: http://www.darthnull.org/2014/10/06/ios-encryption
Comment linking /2014/10/06/ios-encryption
on “Firefox tracking protection decreases page load time by 44%”Submitted Knock Knock? – A Survey of iOS Authentication [pdf] as a story · 9 points
HN discussionIt's much more complicated than that (which is why the FBI needs help). The encryption uses the PIN and a key that is in the phone. If you take the image and try all the PIN combinations you will fail because you don't have the embedded key. http://www.darthnull.org/2014/10/06/ios-encryption > The UID key is used to create a key called “key0x89b.” Key0x89b is used in encrypting the device’s flash disk. Because this…
Comment linking /2014/10/06/ios-encryption
on “Apple can comply with the FBI court order”Submitted Encrypting for Apple's Secure Enclave as a story · 4 points
HN discussionBe forewarned that (to the best of my knowledge) they haven't, and likely don't intend, to document the sqlite structure. The contents in the sqlite file seems to mirror the api responses from their new rest apis, so their Burp analyzer ( https://github.com/1Password/burp-1password-session-analyzer... ) may help matters, as will the absolutely essential reading ( https://darthnull.org/inside-1password/ ) along with…
Comment linking /inside-1password/
on “Userspace FUSE for macOS”Submitted Poem Codes – WWII Crypto Techniques as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI've been wondering this as well. Even with the key derivation function, I'd imagine the CPU also has some secure keys stored in it as well, and these keys are so long that it wouldn't be feasible to brute force it. I'm not sure if thats how the architecture works but thats what I'm thinking. EDIT: This seems like a pretty good primer on iOS full disc encryption. http://www.darthnull.org/2014/10/06/ios-encryption
Comment linking /2014/10/06/ios-encryption
on “A Technical Perspective on the Apple iPhone Case”Submitted Salt as a Service: Interesting approach to hashing passwords as a story · 1 points
HN discussion“On iOS, there is no full-disk or full-volume encryption, only varying levels of file-based encryption...” I don't understand this claim. iOS had full disk encryption starting with iOS 3.0, in 2010. Or at least Apple (and other security experts) says it does: https://darthnull.org/security/2014/10/06/ios-encryption/ Am I missing something here?
Comment linking /security/2014/10/06/ios-encryption/
on “iOS, the Future of MacOS, Freedom, Security and Privacy”Really interesting puzzle. The author also has an update on the other packet types: https://darthnull.org/noise-storm-update/
Comment linking /noise-storm-update/
on “Ping Storms at GreyNoise”It does have some pretty fancy encryption hardware and Apple seems to have made it very difficult to do even with physical access. David Schultz wrote a pretty comprehensive article about it: http://www.darthnull.org/2014/10/06/ios-encryption
Comment linking /2014/10/06/ios-encryption
on “When Phone Encryption Blocks Justice”There's a blog post that sort of summarizes the slides here (which'll have to do until I get the white paper written): http://darthnull.org/2015/01/23/shmoocon-ios-auth
Comment linking /2015/01/23/shmoocon-ios-auth
on “Knock Knock? – A Survey of iOS Authentication [pdf]”I don't think so. According to [0], the passcode is used to protect filesystem encryption keys, meaning that without the code, you cannot decrypt your files. I don't know if pictures are stored encrypted, but I would assume so. edit: apparently I might be wrong. [0] also says that for a while only Mail storage, was encrypted and the default changed in iOS 7. So if your iPhone is on iOS <= 6, you might be able to use…
Comment linking /ios-encryption/
on “Exploiting the iPhone 4”
