The high-stakes legal showdown between Apple and the FBI has abruptly ended, with no resolution to key questions about law enforcement access to devices with strong encryption.
The US government on Monday said it was able to unlock an iPhone used by one of the shooters in the San Bernardino killing rampage, and withdrew its request for a court order to force Apple to help break into the device.
The case is over, but not the debate on encryption.
It remains unclear how the FBI and its unnamed “outside party” were able to extract the data being sought, and whether this technique can be repeated on other iPhones with newer versions of the iOS operating system.
“Security is a cat-and-mouse game, and there are bugs fixed in every iOS update, so this development is not surprising to us in the security community,” said Joseph Hall, chief technologist at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a Washington advocacy group which has backed Apple in the case.
Hall said that because the US government is pursuing a separate case in New York federal court involving a different iPhone model, that suggests the FBI’s hack of the California device may not work in other situations.
“It seems the newer devices might not be vulnerable to this technique,” Hall said. “So in the legal sense, this moves from San Bernardino to the (court in the) Eastern District of New York.”