The daily reports of the battle between Apple and the federal government to have Apple decrypt its iPhone are behind us now, but the lessons to be learned from that scrimmage are still fresh, and have not been in the least internalized. In this month’s column, I will look at the matter and try to discern and discuss those lessons.

Background

The issues came to prominence when a December 2015 terrorist attack in San Bernardino, California, left 14 dead and numerous others wounded. The FBI sought to decrypt one of the terrorist’s Apple iPhone 5s cellphones, which used the iOS 7 operating system. Apple had set up the phones so that it had no device to defeat its own encryption on the phones, and so their content could not be examined. Moreover, Apple had rendered unusable the typical way to defeat encryption—through a “dictionary attack,” i.e., entering any innumerable number of different keys until one of them worked—by setting the phone in such a way that the person attempting to open it had only a certain number of chances to put in the proper encryption key, after which the operating system would immediately wipe the phone’s contents clean. As well, the data was not stored in a cloud backup. The controversy ended in March 2016, when a private company, Cellebrite, the maker of the premier forensic tools for cellphones, found a way around the encryption scheme.

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