| Around the world, governments have increasingly called for backdoors in the encryption schemes that protect your phone's data, arguing that national security is at stake. These campaigns center on the idea that law enforcement needs "lawful access" mechanisms to access digital information for their investigations. The implication is that tech companies should introduce weaknesses in the security schemes that protect their users to make such access possible, and that the companies should then attempt to keep these backdoors under wraps for law enforcement use only.
At the same time, though, many of these governments have been developing or purchasing digital forensic tools that can get around smartphone locks without the help of tech companies. These instruments, made by firms like Cellebrite, Grayshift, and others, are increasingly ubiquitous and give law enforcement an avenue to access private data. As reports flood in that these "phone cracking" tools are being widely used by agencies around the world, cryptographers at Johns Hopkins University set out to understand exactly how they work. The researchers started with the premise that iOS and Android security is very robust and that it must just be rare chance that creates vulnerabilities these tools can exploit. What they actually found, though, is concerning and underscores major discrepancies in governments' arguments about the allegedly urgent need for backdoors in trusted devices and platforms.
Lily Hay Newman | Senior Writer, WIRED |
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