California appeals court approves cell phone sucking

[thewayne]

So theoretically, if you get pulled over for a traffic stop, the officer can suck your phone dry using the same sort of device they use in cell phone stores to transfer data between phones. Your best defense is to silence it and put it in the glove compartment and refuse all requests to search your car without a search warrant.

Since this is an appellate court, hopefully it'll get appealed to the SCOTUS.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/10/06/1234232/calif-appeals-court-approves-cell-phone-searches

Comments

[silveradept]

It's getting to the point where we should just expect to have all of our personal data taken from us by the police if we should happen to do something they think is an offense or something worth stopping you for.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Pretty much, though some municipalities and officers are certainly riskier than others. The one thing that I think is cool is if you root and mod an Android phone, you can put in an encrypted partition with a separate unlock code, so you can manufacture plausible deniability, and the encrypted partition is locked with very strong encryption, so it's going to take some serious CPU cycles to decrypt (or take a rubber hose to the owner). I'm getting an iPhone 4S next week (or at least that's what I'm planning to do) and I don't know what they're offering for encryption these days, much less with the forthcoming iOS 5.

[silveradept]

Is that an app thing, or a "my custom ROM needs to have this capability built into it" thing?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I don't know of a specific technique for plausible deniability, but there were lots of hits in Google including full encryption: http://www.google.com/search?q=android+encryption

There's definitely articles on Android plausible deniability: http://www.google.com/search?q=android+encryption+deniable+partition

One issue is "at rest" encryption. In general computing, sometimes when systems are turned on/in use, the encryption is not applied. The unit has to be powered off/at rest for the full encryption to be used. The Mac full disk encryption is only fully engaged when the computer is logged off/shut down.

I think if I were to put myself into a situation where I anticipated getting arrested, I'd buy a burner phone and have minimal information on it and keep my good phone at home.

A couple more links:
iPhones, Android devices held back by encryption limitations (Defense organizations explore whether commercial devices can provide enough encryption to meet security requirements)
http://defensesystems.com/articles/2011/05/03/cyber-defense-handheld-encryption.aspx

DARPA Wants Full-Disk Encryption For Android, iOS Devices
http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/11/darpa-wants-full-disk-encryption-for-android-ios-devices/

Both are fairly recent, less than six months old. I haven't read either yet, but definitely will be.