Re:Cellebrite Claims It Can Unlock Any iPhone
by gojomo on Friday June 28, 2019 @04:01PM
(#20308293)
Are you sure Apple really wants them fixed ASAP?
Having these outside, ostensibly-unaffiliated teams provide law enforcement with access helps prevent government/legal pressure on Apple to explicitly backdoor their systems.
The ideal bit of kabuki-theater for Apple would be for Apple to always maintain a public stance of total devotion to end-user security... while reliably letting enough subtle, hard-to-find flaws linger so that a few of the most-well-resourced government-friendly agencies can run a business like this. "Everybody" wins!
Indeed, I'd expect it more likely that Cellebrite & their ilk infiltrate Apple with secret agents, or in other ways obtain Apple-proprietary information, to assist their tool-building. Forbes has reported that a competitor to Cellebrite, Grayshift, includes at least one ex-Apple security engineer among its "Principals":
Having these outside, ostensibly-unaffiliated teams provide law enforcement with access helps prevent government/legal pressure on Apple to explicitly backdoor their systems.
The ideal bit of kabuki-theater for Apple would be for Apple to always maintain a public stance of total devotion to end-user security... while reliably letting enough subtle, hard-to-find flaws linger so that a few of the most-well-resourced government-friendly agencies can run a business like this. "Everybody" wins!
Indeed, I'd expect it more likely that Cellebrite & their ilk infiltrate Apple with secret agents, or in other ways obtain Apple-proprietary information, to assist their tool-building. Forbes has reported that a competitor to Cellebrite, Grayshift, includes at least one ex-Apple security engineer among its "Principals":
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/03/05/apple...