![]() Today, as the Justice Department and the FBI seek Apple’s cooperation in unlocking an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists, the specter of the Clipper chip seems to be haunting us. In short, on a modern iOS device that is locked with a strong passcode, there is no back door than to have access to the keys themselves. The 256-bit keys used to encrypt the file system and files are derived from, among other things, the user’s passcode, which is protected in the device’s secure enclave hardware via the user’s fingerprint. On current iOS hardware, for example, information is encrypted using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with 256-bit keys. After a long battle, the Clipper chip program was shot down, largely because the public saw it as too intrusive.īut since then, law enforcement, including top officials at the FBI, have never stopped moaning about the strength of modern cryptography. ![]() It proposed to do this via a scheme called “key escrow,” wherein the cryptographic keys to the kingdom were stored by a presumably trusted escrow service and only turned over to the government upon lawful request in the form of a subpoena. Invading a user’s privacy was a bad idea when it was proposed in the 1990s via the ill-conceived Clipper chip, and it’s a bad idea now, no matter what name it’s given this time.īack in the days of the Clinton administration, the government wanted to force electronics manufacturers to install a chip that would allow the government (with a court order, supposedly) to have unfettered access to any and all encrypted data on the device. ![]()
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