Apple Tells US Judge It's 'Impossible' To Break Through Locks On New iPhones (reuters.com)

Posted by Soulskill on Wednesday October 21, 2015 @12:23AM from the for-sufficiently-possible-values-of-impossible dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Apple told a U.S. judge that accessing data stored on a locked iPhone would be "impossible" with devices using its latest operating system, but the company has the "technical ability" to help law enforcement unlock older phones. Apple's position was laid out in a brief filed late Monday, after a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn, New York, sought its input as he weighed a U.S. Justice Department request to force the company to help authorities access a seized iPhone during an investigation. In court papers, Apple said that for the 90 percent of its devices running iOS 8 or higher, granting the Justice Department's request "would be impossible to perform" after it strengthened encryption methods.

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"Impossible" for Apple by c · 2015-10-21 01:16 · Score: 4, Interesting

It's a straight up application of Schneier's Law:

Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can't break.
-- Bruce Schneier
Someone might be able to break it, but if they can I doubt they'd talk about it.

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Re:Sounds like by tripleevenfall · 2015-10-21 02:21 · Score: 4, Interesting

I see this as a marked strengthening of Apple's platform. If truly not even Apple can unlock or decrypt the phones, then that's a huge benefit to using the platform.
Of course this reminds one of TFA from last week, where it was claimed that the NSA had made some sort of computing breakthrough and could decrypt even standards that are thought to be secure today.