“Although it fiercely opposes the FBI’s demand for help unlocking a San Bernardino shooter’s encrypted iPhone, Apple has never argued that it simply can’t do what the government wants,” Brandon Bailey reports for The Associated Press. “That might not be true for long.”
“Experts say it’s almost certain that Apple and other tech companies will keep increasing the security of their products, making it harder or perhaps even impossible for them to answer government demands for customer data,” Bailey reports. “‘If I were them, I would use any means possible to avoid having to answer these information requests,’ said Anna Lysyanskaya, a computer scientist and cryptography expert at Brown University. ‘It’s bad for their business, and not just in the United States, but in other countries where law enforcement cannot be trusted to follow the law.'”
Apple “could design future iPhone hardware and software security that would be much more difficult to circumvent. It could also lock up its iCloud backup service so that only its users would hold the keys necessary to unscramble data they store online,” Bailey reports. “Apple currently retains iCloud keys so it can provide access for customers who lose their passwords. That means Apple can — as it did in the San Bernardino case — provide unscrambled iCloud files to authorities with a valid search warrant.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: As we wrote back on March 14th:
[This case] also compels Apple to make iOS even more secure. How about encrypted iCloud backups next, Apple?