IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - April 2017 - 103

Apple Versus
the Feds
GOOD-BAD © CANSTOCK PHOTO/STUARTMILES,
CHIP COURTESY OF FREEIMAGES.COM/DIMSHIK

By Karl Stephan

W

hen Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik
died in a hail of gunfire on 2 December 2015
after killing 14 people at a San Bernardino
office party, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) recovered Farook's iPhone within a
few hours. But when federal agents tried to crack into the
phone to find out more details about the tragedy, Appledesigned security measures stopped them. The FBI went to
court to force Apple to crack the phone for them since
Apple refused.
Why? Let's let Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, answer that
one: "[T]he U.S. government has asked us for something
we simply do not have, and something we consider too dangerous to create. They have asked us to build a backdoor to
the iPhone."
A little historical perspective is in order to put this situation into context. With the advent of powerful digital computers in the 1970s, advanced encryption algorithms were
designed and adopted by both the United States and the Soviet Union for secret communications during the Cold War.
The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), long used to spying on analog communications in which good radios were
the most elaborate equipment needed, found itself behind the
technology curve and spent millions on advanced computing
technology to maintain its ability to crack enemy codes.
The computing power of those early NSA computers
now resides on your smartphone, and after a run-in
with the NSA a few years ago, which involved the
agency spying on Apple, the tech company and
its president resolved to do a better job than
ever in protecting its customers' privacy. The
latest iPhone operating system has a feature
that not only encrypts the user's private data
but destroys the internal encryption key if it
detects more than ten attempts to unlock the
phone using the four-digit password. After that
happens, nobody but God can retrieve the data,
or so we are told.
At first the FBI was hoping that the phone
was backed up to the iCloud, where the data

©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/ALBIBERON. APPLE LOGO ©APPLE

How a smartphone
stymied the FBI.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2016.2640680
Date of publication: 15 March 2017

2162-2248/17©2017iEEE

april 2017

^

IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

103



http://www.FREEIMAGES.COM/DIMSHIK http://www.ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/ALBIBERON

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