Two weeks after rival WhatsApp announced that chats on its platform are protected from eavesdropping with end-to-end encryption, the popular messaging app Viber on Tuesday released a privacy-enhanced edition of its iPhone and iPad app.
Bumped to version 6.0, messages you send and receive through Viber are now protected with end-to-end encryption, as indicated by the new padlock icon, and you can also hide away specific chats.
Canadian police have been in possession of a BlackBerry's global decryption key since 2010, reports Vice. The site says recently released court documents reveal that the key was used in a criminal investigation to intercept over 1 million BBM messages.
The documents were made public after members of a Montreal crime syndicate pleaded guilty to their role in a 2011 murder, and they shine some light on the extent that BlackBerry, as well as telco giant Rogers, is willing to cooperate with investigators.
Mobile forensics firm Cellebrite that helped the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation bypass the passcode protection on the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone 5c is adamant that it can also work around Apple's security protections and hack into an iPhone 6, CNN reports.
Italian father Leonardo Fabbretti, who wanted to see the photos stored on his dead son Dama's iPhone but was told by Apple that it was impossible to get into the device without a passcode, has now met with Cellebrite executives who have been working on accessing the files.
WhatsApp today announced it is turning on end-to-end encryption to make it virtually impossible to eavesdrop on your communications.
Starting today, all text messages, photo and video attachments, documents, voice messages and VoIP calls are protected with full end-to-end encryption, developed in collaboration with Open Whisper Systems.
Similar to Apple's iMessage and some other instant messaging platforms such as Telegram, end-to-end encryption makes the contents of WhatsApp chats unreadable to third-parties. And with the encryption keys stored on a user's device, they cannot decrypt chats if served a valid government request.
The Department of Justice filed a request on Monday, asking the court to vacate its order to compel Apple to assist agents in unlocking an iPhone. As expected, the FBI was able to crack the handset without the company's assistance.
The filing comes a week after the DOJ asked the court to postpone its hearing with Apple, claiming it had found a possible method for accessing the data stored on an iPhone 5c, which belonged to San Bernardino shooter Syed Farook.
A group of Johns Hopkins University researchers led by computer science professor Matthew D. Green has discovered a critical bug in Apple's stock Messages app for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad.
The vulnerability would allow nefarious users to decrypt photos and videos sent over iMessage, but there's nothing to worry about—iOS 9.3, which we expect to release after today's Apple event wraps up, contains a patch for this oversight on Apple's part.
In the wake of the high-stake fight between Apple and the United States government over encryption and the right to create products with nearly unbreakable security measures, Apple is now working hard to make it impossible for law enforcement to gain access to data inside device backups on iCloud.
As reported today by The Wall Street Journal, Apple executives are “wrestling with how to strengthen iCloud encryption without inconveniencing users.”
Apple's security and privacy features that come standard on every iOS device, such as end-to-end encryption and Activation Lock, are getting all the talk around the internet as of late as the Apple vs. FBI case continues to escalate.
What can be learned from this case is not only does Apple want to protect your privacy, but the a large number of American people also want to have their privacy. The FBI, on the other hand, wants a quick way to get into any iPhone they deem "suspicious" so long as they can get a court order to search it.
So just how secure is your Apple data, and what protection standards does Apple have in place for you? That's just what we're going to talk about in this piece.
The world's most powerful government has locked horns with the world's most powerful corporation in a battle that Apple implies has the potential to affect civil rights for a generation. As you know, the Justice Department gave Apple until February 26 to respond to its court order.
In it, the government is asking Apple's engineers to create a special version of iOS that would allow brute-force passcode attacks on the shooter's phone electronically.
Now, some people have suggested that the government's experts could make an exact copy of the phone's flash memory to brute-force its way into encrypted data on a powerful computer without needing to guess the passcode on the phone or demand that Apple create a version of iOS that'd remove passcode entry restrictions.
While this is technically feasible, the so-called de-capping method would be painstakingly slow and extremely risky, here's why.
In honor of the Safer Internet Day, Google on Tuesday announced in a blog post that it has added a lock icon in Gmail's web interface to denote whether or not your emails are encrypted. Additionally, a question mark icon on a sender's avatar indicates messages that are not authenticated.
Gmail has supported encrypted connections between a user's machine and its servers for some time now, but this doesn't provide the full protection if a sender's email client or email service does not support encryption in transit using TLS.
The new lock icon makes it easier to see if a message you received from someone is encrypted or not, and whether or not it can be authenticated.
Apple yesterday announced it's opened up its cryptographic libraries, the same ones used to protect iOS and OS X, to third-party developers. As reported by VentureBeat, the move is significant in that developers can now implement advanced security features into their apps, for free.
In addition to open-sourcing the cryptographic libraries, Apple back in the summer promised to open source its Swift programming language by the end of the year.
Late Monday, Apple filed a brief with a federal magistrate judge in Brooklyn, New York, reiterating its inability to unlock its devices. As it has before, the company told the judge that accessing data stored on a locked device running iOS 8 or later is technically impossible, due to strengthened encryption methods.