Hardware hack defeats iPhone passcode security

Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, killed 14 people at an office party on 2 December

IPhone passcodes can be bypassed using just £75 ($100) of electronic components, research suggests.

A Cambridge computer scientist cloned iPhone memory chips, allowing him an unlimited number of attempts to guess a passcode.
The work contradicts a claim made by the FBI earlier this year that this approach would not work.
The FBI made the claim as it sought access to San Bernardino gunman Syed Rizwan Farook's iPhone.

Cheap trick

Farook and his wife killed 14 people in the California city last December before police fatally shot them.
The FBI believed his iPhone 5C contained information about collaborators, but its security system prevented easy access.
The agency pressured Apple to give it a software backdoor into the phone, and, when it refused, reportedly paid $1m to a security company to retrieve data from the phone.
Now, Dr Sergei Skorobogatov, from the University of Cambridge computer laboratory, has spent four months building a testing rig to bypass iPhone 5C pin codes.
In a YouTube video, Dr Skorobogatov showed how he had removed a Nand chip from an iPhone 5C - the main memory storage system used on many Apple devices.

The iPhone hack demanded a high level of electronics expertise

He then worked out how the memory system communicated with the phone so he could clone the chip.
And the target phone was modified so its Nand chip sat on an external board and copied versions could be easily plugged in or removed.
In the video, Dr Skorobogatov demonstrated locking an iPhone 5C by trying too many incorrect combinations.
He then removed the Nand chip and substituted a fresh clone, which had its pin attempt counter set at zero, to allow him to keep trying different codes.
"Because I can create as many clones as I want, I can repeat the process many many times until the passcode is found," he said.
Known as Nand mirroring, the technique is one FBI director James Comey said would not work on Farook's phone.
Finding a four-digit code took about 40 hours of work, Dr Skorobogatov said.
And finding a six-digit code could potentially take hundreds of hours
Using a slightly more sophisticated set-up should make it possible to clone memory chips from other iPhones, including more recent models such as the iPhone 6.
However, Dr Skorobogatov said, more information was needed about the way Apple stored data in memory on more recent phones.
The different techniques could make it "more challenging to analyse and copy", he added.
Apple has not responded to a request for comment on Dr Skorobogatov's research.
Susan Landau, on the Lawfare news blog, said the work showed law enforcement agencies should not look for software backdoors to help their investigations but should develop or cultivate hardware and computer security skills.
"Skorobogatov was able to do what the FBI said was impossible," she said.

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DNA secrets of Ice Age Europe unlocked

By Paul RinconScience editor, BBC News website

Reconstruction of an Ice Age woman based on remains from Abri Pataud in France

A study of DNA from ancient human bones has helped unlock the secrets of Europe's Ice Age inhabitants.

Researchers analysed the genomes of 51 individuals who lived between 45,000 years ago and 7,000 years ago.

The results reveal details about the biology of these early inhabitants, such as skin and eye colour, and how different populations were related.

It also shows that Neanderthal ancestry in Europeans has been shrinking over time, perhaps due to natural selection.

The study in Nature journal shines a torchlight over some 40,000 years of prehistory, showing that ancient patterns of migration were just as complex as those in more recent times.

Some of the earliest arrivals on the continent contributed little to later populations. But between 37,000 years ago and 14,000 years ago, different groups of Europeans were descended from a single founder population.

The fortunes of these human hunting groups were often linked to changes in the climate.

Genomes document mass migration to Europe

Ancient boy's DNA links Europe and America

These 31,000-year-old skulls from Dolni Věstonice in the Czech Republic belong to people from the Gravettian culture

Co-author Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, said the 51 ancient individuals comprised "a pretty substantial fraction of the known human skeletons in this period".

He told BBC News: "Because we've studied so many ancient humans from Europe from the beginning of the modern human occupation, we're able to form a picture of how populations transformed over time."

Prof Reich, Svante Paabo from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and others found evidence that people belonging to one of Europe's most important Ice Age cultures - the Aurignacian - were displaced between 34,000 and 26,000 years ago by another group of humans called the Gravettians.

After 14,000 years ago, Europeans became more closely related to populations from the Middle East, the Caucasus and Turkey. This happens to coincide with the first major warming period at the end of the Ice Age and could reflect an expansion of people from the South-East.

"We see multiple, huge movements of people displacing previous ones," said Prof Reich.

"During this first four-fifths of modern human history in Europe, history is just as complicated as it is during the last fifth that we know so much more about."

This 14,000-year-old individual from Villabruna, Italy, lived at a time when the climate was warming up

Research on that last fifth of population history has revealed that mass movements of people in the Neolithic period (from 7,000 years ago) and the Bronze Age (5,000 years ago) transformed the genetic landscape of Europe.

Analysis of genes carried by Ice Age Europeans shows, among other things, that they had dark complexions and brown eyes. Only after 14,000 years ago did blue eyes begin to spread, and pale skin only appeared across much of the continent after 7,000 years ago - borne by early farmers from the Near East.

Early European populations possessed more Neanderthal ancestry than present-day people, consistent with the idea that much of the DNA we inherited from the Neanderthals had harmful effects. Scientists think this inheritance was progressively lost via natural selection.

What seems clear is that most modern populations offer only hazy glimpses into the past, because their genetics are shaped by relatively recent patterns of migration.

Insights like those from this study have only been made possible by dramatic progress in the last two decades on techniques for analysing degraded DNA from ancient remains.

"A lot of amazing work was done [previously] to develop and use sophisticated methods to forensically piece apart patterns based on populations today," Prof Reich told BBC News.

"But it's a little bit like trying to dissect the ingredients that go into the batter of a cake from the mixed up batter... how much flour, how much egg, how much sugar, how much butter.

"You could do it if you worked really hard and knew the chemistry. But what if you could go back to when they were adding in the butter, adding in the sugar, adding in the flour and measure how much was added in each time."

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Meet the ancestors

Image copyrightLawrence G Straus

Image captionThe Red Lady of El Mirón Cave was part of a population that expanded from south-west Europe as the ice sheets melted

The Aurignacians: A 35,000-year-old male from Goyet, Belgium, belonged to a distinctive branch of the Ice Age population. DNA was extracted from the upper arm bone of the hunter, who was associated with the Aurignacian archaeological culture.

The Gravettians: This ancestral group displaced the Aurignacians to dominate much of Europe from 34,000 to 26,000 years ago. Though they carried distinct genetic signatures, the Gravettians and Aurignacians were descended from the same ancient founder population.

The Magdalenians: The Aurignacian genetic signature disappeared from much of Europe when the Gravettians arrived. But it resurfaced 15,000 years later in the "Red Lady of El Mirón Cave" from northern Spain (pictured). This tall, robust woman was a member of the Magdalenian archaeological culture, which expanded north as the ice sheets melted.

The Villabruna cluster: From about 14,000 years ago, the gene pools of Europe and the Middle East draw closer together - perhaps reflecting an expansion of people from the south-east. This genetic cluster is named after a male hunter from Villabruna, Italy, who had dark skin and blue eyes.

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Follow Paul on Twitter.

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British inventor builds incredible working hoverbike

Colin Furze airborne on his hoverbike

•  by : Madhumita Murgia 
• Lincolnshire plumber, garage inventor and YouTuber Colin Furze has built an actual working hoverbike - an "unhinged flying bike/human blender [that] unbelievably gets off the ground and actually FLIES," as Furze puts it.

  Furze's YouTube video, which shows his attempt at flying the bike, was posted on Thursday and has already been viewed nearly 1.7m times in less than 24 hours. 
  The self-taught engineer, who features on the Sky 1 program Gadget Geeks, built the contraption in his garage.

  It has no brake or seat, but has two accelerators and can be steered. As he says in the video, Furze has no formal engineering qualifications and has never flown before, which makes the feat all the more heart-stopping. 
• While the flying bike seems to be manoeuvrable, it clearly still has trouble landing. Furze has to use his feet to stop the vehicle, and jump off to avoid being injured by the whirring propeller blades. 
•  The bike has apparently been through a range of different prototypes, which are all featured in the video. Furze repeatedly breaks and mangles several earlier models as he tries to land unsuccessfully. 
• This isn't Furze's first outing as a mad stuntman. He has used his plumbing experience to build many contraptions, including theworld's longest motorbike, the world's fastest stroller made with turbojet engines and a jet-powered motorcycle made with pulse jet engines. 
  This latest project was sponsored by Ford as part of the Unlearn campaign which encourages innovation by telling people to try completely new things. 
• 
  In January, as part of the same campaign, he asked the public to suggest their craziest ideas for new types of transportation and promised to build the winners.
  He received 10,000 suggestions in less than 24 hours from Britons, including a heli-helmet, a turbine-powered quadcopter and a hovercraft-helicopter hybrid. 
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SpaceX could send craft to Mars by 2018

It would be a 1st step toward CEO Elon Musk’s goal to set up a human Martian colony

The SpaceX Dragon V2 is seen in 2014. A different version of the Dragon could land on Mars by 2018. (SpaxeX)

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