Is the DEA Lying About iMessage Security?

First time accepted submitter snobody writes "Recently, an article was posted on Slashdot about the claim that law enforcement made about being frustrated by their inability to decrypt messages using Apple's iMessage. However, this article on Techdirt suggests that the DEA may be spewing out disinformation. As the Techdirt article says, if you switch to a new iDevice, you still are able to access your old iMessages, suggesting that Apple has the key somewhere in the cloud. Thus, if law enforcement goes directly to Apple, they should be able to get the key."

Comments

Re:Key in cloud != Key accessible by Apple

[MyFirstNameIsPaul]

BlackBerry phones are encrypted as OP suggests, so when a user forgets a password, then there is nothing BlackBerry can do to help the user.

Re:PGP

[Arancaytar]

If they were the only ones who said so, I'd be inclined to distrust it too. However, RSA has been around for 36 years now with no serious challenges, so either there is a world-wide conspiracy that controls every single mathematician (or several that between them control all the mathematicians), or it's unbroken.

It's also possible that there are a few mathematicians decades ahead of current research that all work for various governments, but considering how much of mathematical work is derivative now, it seems far too unlikely that some unaffiliated researcher wouldn't have stumbled across the discovery independently.

(Well, or the NSA has a working quantum computer that can do work on a useful scale, which goes back to "decades ahead of current research".)