The police dislike Apple and Google’s latest smartphones because of their high-end encryption, according to a senior FBI official.
“Encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place. Justice may be denied because of a locked phone or an encrypted hard drive,” said James Comey, FBI Director, in a speech last month.
The latest devices and operating systems (iOS8and Android Lollipop) have encryption turned on by default, implying that no master key is available with Apple or Google to be passed on to investigators.
Apple confirmed this on its website, “Unlike our competitors, Apple cannot bypass your passcode and therefore cannot access this data. So it’s not technically feasible for us to respond to government warrants.”
- READ MORE: Court: Police may demand fingerprint to unlock iPhone but cannot demand security passcode.
Google also assures its customers in similar terms, though not as explicitly as Apple, “Full device encryption occurs at first boot, using a unique key that never leaves the device.”
Encrypted data guarantees transfer of data secured through a digital lock that cannot be easily picked. Encryption is widely used in most of the web-mail services and net based transfer of data. However, in iOS8 and Android Lollipop, the encryption key is stored on the device itself instead of appearing on multiple servers. The key is generated and stored on device and even the manufacturers cannot seek the key to decrypt the device.
This is vexing the investigating officials who want the Apple and Google to relax their robustness. On the other hand, users are quite relaxed that their data cannot be sucked out of their phone or computers.
Strong and powerful encryption are here to stay and so the investigating authorities are trying to attack the networks instead.
Department of Justice has been flying planes fitted with “dirtboxes” that impersonate cellphone transmitters to snoop data back and forth, as we reported it last week
Additionally, cloud storage, vulnerable to low grade hacking and compromise, also are a strong threat to safely encrypted devices of Apple and Google.
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