Apple Tries to Explain to U.K. Legislators That You Can’t Add Back Doors to Secure Protocols
upstart writes:
Apple Tries to Explain to U.K. Legislators That You Can't Add Back Doors to Secure Protocols:
Zoe Kleinman, reporting for BBC News:
Apple says it will remove services such as FaceTime and iMessage from the UK rather than weaken security if new proposals are made law and acted upon.The government is seeking to update the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) 2016. It wants messaging services to clear security features with the Home Office before releasing them to customers. The act lets the Home Office demand security features are disabled, without telling the public. Under the update, this would have to be immediate. [...]
The U.K. legislators pushing this believe, wrongly, that it must be possible for these messaging platforms to add "good guys only" back doors. That if they pass this law, the result will be that the nerds who work at these companies will be forced to figure out a way to comply. What will actually happen is that these companies will be forced to pull the services from U.K., because they can't comply, unless they scrap their current end-to-end encryption and replace it-worldwide-with something insecure, which they aren't going to do.
[...] And while it's Apple and iMessage/FaceTime that are getting the headlines today, it's WhatsApp that's the big player in the UK, with 75 percent of adult Britons using it monthly. It's hard to overstate how much outrage these legislators are poised to bring upon themselves if they effectively ban WhatsApp. (The legislators themselves surely all depend upon it.)
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