iPhone 7 : Apple ensuring a FBI hack-proof iPhone?
Apple vs FBI : Even as the case is being heard in the US Courts, the pro-hacking lobby is up in arms with the anti-hacking lobby. While many CEOs have come in favour of Apple, the Republican candidate Donald Trump calling for a boycott of Apple products until the company complies with a court order to unlock an iPhone used by the shooter in the San Bernardino attacks.
Even as reports suggest that Apple engineers are working on new security measures that will prevent the government from breaking into a locked iPhone. But will these new security measures be baked into the upcoming Apple flagship, iPhone 7.
Court subpoenas are a big worry for tech companies as US government agencies can approach any company to divulge confidential consumer information and communications. In the Apple vs. FBI case, Apple has emerged as the only company that has been able to resist strongly the requirements on data access set forth in Federal wiretapping laws.
According to reports, Apple is building such encryption technology that the company itself may not be able to break into any future devices. And the upcoming flagship from Apple, the iPhone 7 looks to be the right candidate for a smartphone that may be totally unhackable, such that Apple itself will not even be able to break in. ValueWalk sees the benefit in it that makes it impossible for others to exploit any backdoor that Apple leaves for itself.
Apple’s chief executive Timothy D. Cook states in an interview with ABC News, “For all of those people who want to have a voice but they’re afraid, we are standing up, and we are standing up for our customers because protecting them we view as our job.”
Though Apple has already started working on its unhackable security measures, it has not confirmed whether such measures will be baked into iPhone 7, which will be launched sometime in September. This measure will surely become part of an iOS update so that any iPhone updated with the new iOS will become unhackable, too.
As to the San Bernardino iPhone, the company has revealed that all information it has about the unit were already turned over to the authorities, although it is not yet complete. Apple’s use of end-to-end encryption does not allow access into anything on the device, which is why the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not able to turn up with anything.
Apple has vowed to fight the order by the Justice Department asking them to crack the iPhone in question, with Cook declaring that this would put their customers at risk, not to mention having their civil rights “trampled.”
“If a court can ask us to write this piece of software, think about what else they could ask us to write — maybe it’s an operating system for surveillance, maybe the ability for the law enforcement to turn on the camera,” according to Cook. “I don’t know where this stops. But I do know that this is not what should be happening in this country.”
