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iPhone 5C

The courtroom battle betwixt the FBI and Apple came to an anticlimactic end late last month when the FBI suddenly appear that Apple'southward assistance was no longer necessary, and that information technology could access Rizwan Farook'south iPhone with help from a private company. While the FBI may accept plant a workaround in this case, the solution is an imperfect one, according to FBI Manager James Comey.

Comey recently spoke at Kenyon College, where he told students and professors that the device the FBI purchased "[D]oesn't piece of work on 6s, doesn't work on a 5s, and then we accept a tool that works on a narrow slice of phones."

Apple-SecureMode

The fact that the technique doesn't piece of work on devices later than the iPhone 5c suggests Apple tree'south implementation of ARM's TrustZone technology (Apple calls its specific flavour Secure Enclave) is blocking the FBI's hacking attempts on more modern devices. Here's how Apple describes it in its iOS 9 security guide:

The Secure Enclave is a coprocessor fabricated in the Apple A7 or later A-series processor. It utilizes its own secure boot and personalized software update separate from the awarding processor. It provides all cryptographic operations for Data Protection fundamental management and maintains the integrity of Data Protection even if the kernel has been compromised.

The Secure Enclave uses encrypted retentivity and includes a hardware random number generator. Its microkernel is based on the L4 family unit, with modifications by Apple tree. Communication between the Secure Enclave and the application processor is isolated to an interrupt-driven mailbox and shared memory data buffers.

Each Secure Enclave is provisioned during fabrication with its own UID (Unique ID) that is not accessible to other parts of the system and is non known to Apple. When the device starts up, an ephemeral fundamental is created, entangled with its UID, and used to encrypt the Secure Enclave'due south portion of the device's memory space.

There are several implications to Comey's statement. First, it's entirely possible he's simply lying. The NSA is known to collect zero-twenty-four hour period exploits and many security experts take argued that the FBI / NSA could easily have cracked Farook's iPhone, but went public with the court case every bit a way to win public approval and support for its actions.

Comey

FBI director James Comey

If nosotros assume Comey isn't lying, it'south a virtual certainty the FBI and NSA will focus their cracking efforts on iPhone devices in the future — and they're probably not going to be willing to talk near those issues with Apple tree, given the company's very public not-cooperation. Comey alluded to this when he told the Kenyon students the following: "We tell Apple, then they're going to fix it, then we're dorsum where nosotros started from," he said. "Nosotros may end up there, we simply haven't decided yet."

The FBI's ain internal fence seems to mirror the arguments going on in the White House. The Obama Administration will not offer public support for draft legislation that would force Apple, Google, or other companies to crack their own encryption at the behest of the FBI, according to Reuters. The White House, like the FBI, is reportedly deeply divided on this issue.

Since nosotros don't know how much Apple and the FBI cooperated on security testing and problems fixes before now, we can't judge the potential impact of future non-cooperation betwixt the two organizations. No thing what happens, Apple is likely to put even more emphasis on securing its devices in the time to come — and the FBI volition pour more try into cracking them.