Crypt Conundrum in Cupertino

 The Federal Bureau of Investigation has asked the engineers at Apple that developed the iPhone's password encryption to code a decryption key to allow the bureau to access the phone of the San Bernardino shooter. However, this proposal has not generated a positive response from those engineers due to their beliefs regarding the encryption they have made.

1a. Integrity; though the FBI demands the code solely to gain access to one iPhone and stipulates it will only want this code for that phone, it may use it subsequently to gain access to other iPhones, hence going back on their promises.

1b. Law enforcement usually seizes smartphones such as these in order to use data stored on them as evidence, which causes their need for decyrption.

2a. The user turns on their phone; well, it would either be off completely or in standby mode. If turned off, the phone will boot the operating system from its storage media, loading relevant files, applications and drivers into memory. If in standby mode, the phone will display the login screen. After either process is done, you swipe your finger along the screen in order to summon the password entry screen. On this screen, a keyboard appears with which you can type your password. When you are done, the password is checked against the hash stored on the phone; should the hash decode to the typed password, then access to the phone shall be granted.

2b. The FBI using this master key on other iPhones would allow them a backdoor into anyone’s phone and additionally to track data and communications sent and received; many would be devastated to hear this and may possibly result in protest.

3. Engineers feel emotional turmoil creating an antithesis to their own encryption; they had coded it passionately to secure data and documents effectively, but now they would be undoing this security and all the work they had done would be for nothing. In addition, many of the engineers in relevant departments are friends with one another, sharing common values of perhaps arguing until they win and a constant, religious devotion to their handiwork. The violation of these principles would not sit well socially with the engineers.

The reliability of the decryption could possibly be impacted by this emotional turmoil. As such, the decryption either may not work and cause errors when the FBI attempts to decrypt the phone or even corrupt data and the phone should the Apple engineers have programmed routines for that to happen when the phone detected attempts to break the encryption. Perhaps the system may do nothing at all, but display dialog boxes and other such things that make the system appear to be decrypting itself. A side effect of this would be the relief of most end-users since their phones would not be effected should the decryption pretend to operate as per the bureau’s criteria and the relevant privacy and security issues would not apply.

In addition the integrity problem surrounding the FBI should it use the decryption on any other iPhone, privacy issues would also arise due to the effectively unlimited access the bureau would have to citizens’ iPhones and possibly those outside their jurisdiction. Hence, any communications made and received could be intercepted and possibly used without consent of those people.

This privacy problem could also become much more pervasive should hackers outside of the FBI get a hold of the decryption code. They would then be able to access the communications of others at their own disposal and use them against those people for frivolous purposes such as blackmail or fraud. They could also plant viruses or malware on the iPhones in order to continue such activity or to corrupt the system, posing a security risk to users.

4. A possible solution to this problem would to perhaps create the decryption, but first produce an update that users can download that renders them invulnerable to the decryption so that the FBI can only ever crack one phone while the rest are un-tampered and are not tracked further by the bureau. As with the decryption, this update may not be reliable either; for it may not operate at all and still allow the decryption to work, or it may corrupt data on the storage media or whatnot. Though, the update would also display a dialog box or other sort of message as follows: “We have been asked by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to write code that would allow it access to the iPhone of the suspect of the recent San Bernardino shooting (i.e. decrypting it). This level of access would create vulnerabilities for many iPhone users, so we have created this update to prevent that code from running on any other devices.” This way, Apple can maintain good standing among its consumers due to its integrity and the update and not lose sales to competitors such as Microsoft or the numerous manufacturers of Android-based phones. Also, the engineers would be able to rectify some of the social and emotional turmoil created for them since their encryption, in the end, would still stand victorious as would their values and devotion. Given all these factors and that the FBI would be able to still obtain the necessary evidence; this may be the best possible solution.

The article can be found here: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/22/apple-vs-fbi-engineers-breaking-encryption-unholy

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