The Homomorphic Encryption market research report now available with Market Study Report, LLC, is a compilation of pivotal insights pertaining to market size, competitive spectrum, geographical outlook, contender share, and consumption trends of this industry. The report also highlights the key drivers and challenges influencing the revenue graph of this vertical along with strategies adopted by distinguished players to enhance their footprints in the Homomorphic Encryption market.

According to the report, the Homomorphic Encryption market is a collection of details that provides an in-depth evaluation of the industry vertical. The valuation of the Homomorphic Encryption market is from a dual viewpoint considering production and consumption.

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Considering the production clause, the report provides data about the product renumeration, gross margins of the firms manufacturing the product, and manufacturing of the product. With regards to consumption, the report speaks about the product consumption value and product consumption volume in tandem with the status of import and export of the products.

An overview of the regional landscape:

Regional segmentation: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa, Latin America.

Pivotal point in this section:

This report provides an understanding of the regional segment of this industry.

Crucial points encompassed in the report:

Brief of the product spectrum:

Product segmentation:

Pivotal point in this section:

The study offers particulars about the product reach.

An overview of the report:

Important aspects from the application terrain:

Application segmentation:

Pivotal point in this section:

Details about the classification of the application spectrum is mentioned in the report.

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A succinct overview of the application-based segment of the Homomorphic Encryption market:

A concise overview of competitive reach:

Competitive segmentation:

Pivotal point in this section:

The study presents specifics about the competitive spectrum of the Homomorphic Encryption market.

Glimpse into some concepts and ideas offered by the report:

The study offers data associated to the growth margins of the firms in tandem with the manufacturing expenses, product costs, and renumeration. A significant amount of data is provided which speaks about the level to which the industry has been evaluated. Data pertaining the possibility of new investment projects that are undertaken, as well as the research conclusions, are presented in the report.

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Development Trend of Analysis of Homomorphic Encryption Market

Marketing Channel

Market Dynamics

Methodology/Research Approach

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Latest Study explores the Homomorphic Encryption Market Witness Highest Growth in near future - Technology Magazine

The debate about encryption is stuck in a long battle between one camp arguing that access to encrypted data is essential for law enforcement and another camp arguing that encryption is necessary to protect against cyber espionage and to enable individuals to safeguard their information. The debate also does not seem to move forward. Just like in the 2016 San Bernardino case, the Justice Department is pressing Apple to provide the data from the two iPhones belonging to the Saudi lieutenant who acted as the gunman during the shooting at the Pensacola naval base last month.

The debate has received attention over the plans by Facebook to expand encryption of user messages, a policy that the FBI director referred to as a dream come true for child pornographers. But the new Pensacola case again raises the issues from the San Bernardino mass shooting. The law enforcement argument is best understood through the positions of the Justice Department and the FBI, which have been fighting a losing battle against the use of end to end encryption, security that ensures only the sender and receiver can read the message. The Justice Department and the FBI want such encryption banned, replaced by exceptional access systems allowing law enforcement with a warrant to read the messages.

On the other side of the argument in the encryption debate are primarily civil libertarians and cybersecurity experts. The problem they see is that exceptional access would decrease broader cybersecurity. Computer security experts argue that if you make it easy for law enforcement to get around encryption, this makes it easy for the bad guys, such as malicious hackers, foreign nations, criminals, and spies, to also do the same thing.

While we have started on different sides of the argument, we have both long recognized the need to find a critical path forward. Earlier this year, we convened a working group of former law enforcement and national security officials, civil society organizations, business representatives, and academics to work together on finding practical and useful solutions that acknowledge the importance of the two dimensions of national security.

What we found, through months of meeting with experts on both sides of the argument, is that we have been thinking about the debate the wrong way. We started our initial working group meeting by throwing out two strawmen. First, we should stop seeking approaches to enable access to encrypted information. Second, law enforcement officials will not be able to protect the public unless they can obtain access to all encrypted data. Once we changed the nature of the debate, we found a lot of agreement.

We agreed that proposals should address a legitimate and demonstrated law enforcement problem, that solutions should not make disparities in law enforcement worse, and that it should not be possible to repurpose exceptional access solutions into mass surveillance tools. We agreed that these tools should not appreciably decrease public cybersecurity, and that use of the capability should be documented and reported in a way that enables public oversight. By far the most promising path for the current debate was focusing on law enforcement access to data at rest.

By putting aside the more controversial debate about data in motion, or information being passed between two devices on an encrypted platform, and focusing on a conversation about data at rest, or information stored on a particular device, allowed us to find a more pragmatic way to address the concerns of both privacy advocates and law enforcement. This was an important starting point, and while we did not conclude with an agreed upon proposal, we were able to make progress. Embracing this approach could help move this entrenched debate in a more constructive direction.

One thing we did manage to all agree on is that no single approach will solve every problem when it comes to the encryption debate. It is now well past time to rethink the belief that solutions are impossible and that encryption means law enforcement officials cannot do their jobs. So by breaking the debate down into its component parts and looking at points of agreement, there is a path toward a more fruitful and more civil debate.

Denis McDonough is a visiting senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former White House chief of staff. Susan Landau is the Bridge Professor in Cyber Security and Policy with Tufts University.

Originally posted here:
Breaking the encryption impasse | TheHill - The Hill

In a tweet late Tuesday, President Trumpcriticized Apple for refusing to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements. Trump was specifically referring to a locked iPhone that belonged to a Saudi airman who killed three U.S sailors in an attack on a Florida base in December.

Its only the latest example of the government trying to gain access to a terror suspects device it claims it cant access because of the encryption that scrambles the devices data without the owners passcode.

The government spent the past week bartering for Apples help. Apple said it had given to investigators gigabytes of information, including iCloud backups, account information and transactional data for multiple accounts. In every instance it received a legal demand, Apple said it responded with all of the information it had. But U.S. Attorney General William BarraccusedApple of not giving investigators any substantive assistance in unlocking the phone.

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The US government should stop demanding tech companies compromise on encryption - TechCrunch

Its a relatively slow week on the platforms-and-democracy beat, so lets talk about something small but fascinating in its own way: the arrival of Instagram messages on the web.

An unfortunate thing about being a xennial who grew up using (and loving) the world wide web is that most developers no longer build for it. Over the past 15 years, mobile phones became more popular than desktop computers ever were, and the result is that web development has entered a slow but seemingly inexorable decline. At the same time, like most journalists, I spent all day working on that same web. And with each passing year, the place where I do most of my work seems a little less vital.

This all feels particularly true when it comes to communications tools. Once, every messaging kingdom was united with a common API, allowing us to gather our conversations into a single place. (Shout out to Adium.) But today, our messages are often scattered across a dozen or more corporate inboxes, and accessing them typically requires picking up your phone and navigating to a separate app.

As a result, I spend a lot of time typing on a glass screen, where I am slow and typo-prone, rather than on a physical keyboard, where Im lightning-quick. And each time I pick up my phone to respond to a message on WhatsApp, or Snapchat, or Signal, I inevitably find a notification for some other app, and the next thing I know 20 minutes have passed.

All of which is to say, I was extremely excited today to see Instagrams announcement that it had begun rolling out direct messages on the web. (The company gave me access to the feature, and its glorious.) Heres Ashley Carman at The Verge:

Starting today, a small percentage of the platforms global users will be able to access their DMs from Instagrams website, which should be useful for businesses, influencers, and anyone else who sends lots of DMs, while also helping to round out the apps experience across devices. Todays rollout is only a test, the company says, and more details on a potential wide-scale rollout will come in the future.

The direct messaging experience will be essentially the same through the browser as it is on mobile. You can create new groups or start a chat with someone either from the DM screen or a profile page; you can also double-tap to like a message, share photos from the desktop, and see the total number of unread messages you have. Youll be able to receive desktop DM notifications if you enable notifications for the entire Instagram site in your browser.

Instagram didnt state a strategic rationale for the move, but it makes sense in a world that is already moving toward small groups and private communication. Messengers win in part by being ubiquitous, and even if deskbound users like myself are in the minority, Facebook can only grab market share from rivals if its everywhere those rivals can be found. (iMessage and Signal, for example, have long been usable on desktop as well as mobile devices.)

Now, thanks to this move, I can make greater use of Instagram as both a social and reporting tool, and the web itself feels just a bit more vital. All of which is good news but, asks former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, is it secure? After all, Facebook is in the midst of a significant shift toward private, end-to-end encrypted messaging, with plans to create a single, encrypted backend for all of its messaging apps.

Stamos went on to highlight two core challenges in making web-based communications secure. One is securely storing cryptographic information in JavaScript, the lingua franca of the web. (This problem is being actively worked on, Stamos notes.) The second is that the nature of the web would allow a company to create a custom backdoor targeting an individual user if compelled by a government, say. For that, there are few obvious workarounds.

One alternative is to take the approach that Signal and Facebook-owned WhatsApp have, and create native or web-based apps. As security researcher Saleem Rashid told me, the web version of WhatsApp generates a public key in the browser using JavaScript, then encodes it in a QR code that a users scans with their phone. This creates an encrypted tunnel between the web and the smartphone, and so long as the JavaScript involved in generating the key is not malicious, WhatsApp should not be able to encrypt any of the messages.

When I asked Instagram about how it plans to square the circle between desktop messages and encryption, the company declined to comment. Im told that it still plans to build encryption into its products, and is still working through exactly how to accomplish this.

Granted, when I think of the tasks that I hope Facebook accomplishes this year, encrypted Instagram DMs are low on the list. But with our authoritarian president browbeating Apple today for failing to unlock a suspected criminals phone, the stakes for all this are relatively clear. We will either have good encrypted messaging backed by US corporations, or we wont. As Apple put it this week:

We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys, the company explained. Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers. ... We feel strongly encryption is vital to protecting our country and our users data.

On one level, todays Instagram news is a small story about a niche feature. But in the background, questions about the security of our private communications are swirling. Which should give us all reason to watch Facebooks next moves here very closely.

Today in news that could affect public perception of the big tech platforms.

Trending down: Facebook said it doesnt need to change its web-tracking services to comply with Californias new consumer-privacy law. The companys rationale is that routine data transfers about consumers dont fit the laws definition of selling data. The move puts it at odds with Google, which is taking the opposite tack.

Trending down: Grindr, OkCupid and Tinder are sharing sensitive user data like dating choices and precise location to advertisers in ways that may violate privacy laws, according to a new report. I dont want to downplay that, but if you think that data is sensitive, you should see the average Grindr users DMs.

Two days before the UK election in December, some 74,000 political advertisements vanished from Facebooks Ad Library, a website that serves as an archive of political and issue ads run on the platform. The company said a bug wiped 40 percent of all political Facebook ads in the UK from the public record. Rory Smith at BuzzFeed has the story:

In the wake of the failure during the UK elections, Facebook said it had launched a review of how to prevent these issues, as well as how to communicate them more clearly.

But the events of Dec. 10 are not the first time Facebooks Ad Library has failed since its launch in May 2018. The API, which is supposed to give researchers greater access to data than the library website, went live in March 2019 and ran into trouble within weeks of the European Parliament election in May. Researchers have been documenting a myriad of issues ever since.

The platform also drew the ire of researchers when it failed to deliver the data it promised as part of a partnership with the nonprofit Social Science Research Council and Social Science One, a for-profit initiative run by researchers a project that was funded by several large US foundations. Facebook said it remains committed to providing data to researchers, but the SSRC and funders have begun withdrawing from the project due to the companys delays.

Russian military hackers may have been boring into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the impeachment inquiry, where Hunter Biden served on the board. Experts say the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens, similar to what Trump was looking for. On Twitter, security experts like Facebooks Nathaniel Gleicher have urged caution when writing about this story, arguing that the case for attribution to Russia is thin. (Nicole Perlroth and Matthew Rosenberg / The New York Times)

Theres been an explosion of online disinformation, including the use of doctored images, from politicians. They do it for a simple reason: Its effective at spreading their messages, and so far none have paid a price for trafficking in bogus memes. (Drew Harwell / The Washington Post)

Artificial personas, in the form of AI-driven text generation and social-media chatbots, could drown out actual human discussions on the internet, experts warn. They say the issue could manifest itself in particularly frightening ways during an election. (Bruce Schneier / The Atlantic)

The Treasury Department unveiled new rules designed to increase scrutiny of foreign investors whose potential stakes in US companies could pose a national security threat. The rules are focused on businesses that handle personal data, and come after the United States has heightened scrutiny of foreign involvement in apps such as Grindr and TikTok. (Katy Stech Ferek / The Wall Street Journal)

The Harvard Law Review just floated the idea of adding 127 more states to the union. These states would add enough votes in Congress to rewrite the Constitution by passing amendments aimed at making every vote count equally. Worth a read.(Ian Millhiser / Vox)

The New York Times editorial board interviewed Bernie Sanders on how he plans carry out his ambitious policy ideas if faced with the Republican-led Senate that stymied so many of President Barack Obamas proposals. Notably, he says hes not an Amazon Prime customer and tries never to use any apps.

Workers for grocery delivery platform Instacart are organizing a national boycott of the company next week to push for the reinstatement of a 10 percent default tip on all orders. One of 2020s big stories is going to be tech-focused labor movements; this is but the latest example. (Kim Lyons / The Verge)

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella strongly criticized a new citizenship law that the Indian government passed last month. The law, known as the Citizenship Amendment Act, fast-tracks Indian citizenship for immigrants from most major South Asian religions except Islam. India is Nadellas birthplace, and one of Microsofts largest markets, making his comments all the more notable. (Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed)

Facebooks push into virtual reality has resulted in a slew of new patents, mostly for heads-up displays. The company won 64 percent more patents in 2019 than in 2018. Christopher Yasiejko and Sarah Frier at Bloomberg explain what this might mean:

The breadth of Facebooks patent growth, said Larry Cady, a senior analyst with IFI, resembled that of intellectual-property heavyweights Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc., which were No. 9 and No. 7, respectively, with each winning more than twice as many patents as the social media titan. Facebooks largest numbers were in categories typical of Internet-based computer companies -- data processing and digital transmission, for example -- but its areas of greatest growth were in more novel categories that may suggest where the company sees its future.

Facebooks 169 patents in the Optical Elements category marked a nearly six-fold jump. Most of that growth stems from the Heads-Up Displays sub-category, which Cady said probably is related to virtual-reality headsets. Facebook owns the VR company Oculus and in November acquired the Prague-based gaming studio behind the popular Beat Saber game. One such patent, granted Nov. 5, is titled Compact head-mounted display for artificial reality.

Popular e-boys on TikTok are nabbing fashion and entertainment deals. Theyre known mostly for making irony-steeped videos of themselves in their bedrooms wearing tragically hip outfits composed of thrifted clothes. Some observers predict that top e-boys will have success reminiscent of the boy bands of yore. (Rebecca Jennings / Vox)

YouTube signed three video stars Lannan LazarBeam Eacott, Elliott Muselk Watkins and Rachell Valkyrae Hofstetter to combat Amazons Twitch and Facebook. Exclusive deals for top video game streamers have been one of the big tech stories of the year so far. (Salvador Rodriguez / CNBC)

Uncanny Valley, Anna Wieners beautiful memoir about life working at San Francisco tech companies, is out today. Kaitlyn Tiffany has a great interview with Wiener in the Atlantic. Read this book and stay tuned for news about an Interface Live event with Wiener in San Francisco next month!

Mark Bergen, friend of The Interface and a journalist at Bloomberg, is writing a book about YouTube titled Like, Comment, Subscribe. Bergen is a former Recode colleague and ace YouTube reporter, and this book will be a must-read in our world. (Kia Kokalitcheva / Axios)

The Information published a Twitter org chart that identifies the companys 66 top executives, including the nine people who report directly to CEO Jack Dorsey. (Alex Heath / The Information)

A new app called Doublicat allows users to put any face on a GIFs in seconds, essentially allowing them to create deepfakes. The app launches just as prominent tech companies like Facebook and Reddit ban deepfakes almost completely. (Matthew Wille / Input)

Wired got Jack Dorsey to do 11 minutes of Twitter tech support on video. Enjoy!

Send us tips, comments, questions, and web-based DMs: casey@theverge.com and zoe@theverge.com.

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Instagram messages on the web could pose an encryption challenge - The Verge

If youre looking for a secure external drive that meets both US military and government security standards, there are a number of encrypted external SSD options around. I reviewed one approach a couple of years ago, the iStorage diskAshur 2, which has a built-in PIN pad for entering a seven- to 15-digit code to unlock the drive.

The SecureDrive BT is a similar idea, but instead of a PIN pad, you unlock it via Bluetooth. Specifically, when you plug the drive into your Mac, you can use Face ID on your iPhone to unlock it

The drive is available in both spinning metal and SSD variants, in capacities ranging from 250 GB to 8 TB. Pricing for SSDs ranges from $262 (250GB) to $3,309 (8TB). I tested the 1TB SSD model at $458.80.

The drive can be used with Mac, Windows, and Linux, and the companion app is available on both iOS and Android.

The drive looks much like any other external drive. It has a blue anodized aluminum body with black plastic endcaps. On the front is a Secure Drive Bluetooth name, and on the back a somewhat unsightly mix of barcode, website, and various standards compliance logos.

One thing to watch for: SecureDrive tells me its available with both USB-A and USB-C cables. The drive I got had a USB-A cable, so needed an adapter to connect it to my MacBook Pro.

SecureDrive BT uses the same AES256-bit XTS hardware encryption as the iStorage drive. Often referred to as military-grade encryption, this is certified by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) as standard P1619 and is indeed approved for US military use.

The encrypted external SSD is also FIPS 140-3 certified. This is the Federal Information Processing Standards certification, which allows it to be used for the storage of US government Top Secret documents.

Inside, the chips are encased in epoxy resin, meaning its not possible to extract the SSD chips from the rest of the hardware.

The app lets you set a password in the 7- to 15-character range, and you can then choose to toggle on Face ID, Apple Watch unlock, or both. The drive offers remote-wipe capabilities, and can be set to automatically wipe if 10 incorrect passwords are entered.

Incidentally, Apples FileVault also offers the same AES256-bit XTS standard, but defaults to the weaker 128-bit version for performance reasons. Disk Utility does, however, give you the option of formatting with full 256-bit AES.

Running Blackmagic, I saw write speeds of around 310MB/s, and read speeds of around 325MB/s.

These are, of course, low numbers compared to the very fast external SSDs available now, and there are two reasons for that. First, the interface is USB 3.1. Second, the AES256-bit XTS encryption does significantly slow things down, which is the reason Apple defaults to 128-bit with FileVault.

The bottom line here is that youre probably not going to want to use this as a working drive for demanding applications like video editing though it will cope with HD video.

Thats not to say its aslow drive in SSD form, but its still about half to two-thirds the speed of an equivalent unencrypted drive.

Mostly, though, this is a drive youre going to use to store commercially sensitive documents, like product designs, in-progress apps, marketing materials for unannounced products, customer databases, and similar.

Once the SecureDrive BT is unlocked, it works just like any other drive. So the in use section of the review is really about the unlocking experience and here theres good news and bad.

The bad news is that its a little less convenient than a drive with a keypad. To unlock it, you have to open the companion app and tap the drive name. At that point, Face ID will unlock it. But if you keep the app on your homescreen, unlocking is about as fast as using a keypad.

The good news is that youre trading off a slight inconvenience for more security. A keypad limits you to a numeric passcode; with this drive, you can have an alphanumeric password, including all special characters.

Plus, its not obvious that its a secure drive. If someone sees a drive with a keypad used in public, it draws attention to itself. This one, however, looks no different to any other external drive, and using your phone isnt going to be associated with unlocking the drive. So its the more discreet option, as well as the more secure. SecureDrive does make a keypad version, too, if you prefer that.

As I said about the diskAshur 2, whether or not the SecureDrive BT is right for you really depends on whether you have a need for the security:

The real question is whether you need this level of security. For the average consumer, its overkill, but I could definitely see some professional users appreciating it. Carrying around external drives with commercially sensitive materials on them is always a little nerve-wracking. There have been all kinds of reports of drives being left in embarrassing places like bars and trains.

For a startup, the peace of mind could well be worth the relatively small premium youre paying for heavy-duty security. For professional freelancers, it could even be turned into a selling point for clients. So if you need an external SSD and could use the reassurance this one brings, it could be very good value.

If you do need the security, or can use it as a selling tool, then the drive justifies itself. If you dont, you can get faster performance at a significantly lower price in unencrypted form. For example, the equivalent Western Digital My Passport 1TB SSD is about 50% faster and has a list price of $340 against just over $500 for the SecureDrive BT (and the WD drive is available for much less on Amazon). So, if you need this, it will be worth the price; if you dont, it wont.

The Secure Drive BT encrypted external SSD is available from Amazon in both spinning metal and SSD variants, in capacities ranging from 250GB to 8TB. I tested the 1TB SSD model at $458.80. The equivalent spinning metal version costs $238.

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Review: SecureDrive BT, the encrypted external SSD you can unlock with Face ID - 9to5Mac

Introduction

Malware is complex and meant to confuse. Many computer users think malware is just another word for virus when a virus is actually a type of malware. And in addition to viruses, malware includes all sorts of malicious and unwanted code, including spyware, adware, Trojans and worms. Malware has been known to shut down power grids, steal identities and hold government secrets for ransom.

The swift detection and extraction of malware is always called for, but malware isnt going to make it easy. Malware is mischievous and slippery, using tricks like obfuscation, encoding and encryption to evade detection.

Understanding obfuscation is easier than pronouncing it. Malware obfuscation makes data unreadable. Nearly every piece of malware uses it.

The incomprehensible data usually contains important words, called strings. Some strings hold identifiers like the malware programmers name or the URL from which the destructive code is pulled. Most malware has obfuscated strings that hide the instructions that tell the infected machine what to do and when to do it.

Obfuscation conceals the malware data so well that static code analyzers simply pass by. Only when the malware is executed is the true code revealed.

Simple malware obfuscation techniques like exclusive OR (XOR), Base64, ROT13 and codepacking are commonly used. These techniques are easy to implement and even easier to overlook. Obfuscation can be as simple as interposed text or extra padding within a string. Even trained eyes often miss obfuscated code.

The malware mimics everyday use cases until it is executed. Upon execution, the malicious code is revealed, spreading rapidly through the system.

Next-level malware obfuscation is active and evasive. Advanced malware techniques, like environmental awareness, confusing automated tools, timing-based evasion, and obfuscating internal data, allow (Read more...)

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Malware Obfuscation, Encoding and Encryption - Security Boulevard

Apple and the US government are at loggerheads for the second time in four years over unlocking iPhones connected to a mass shooting, reviving debate over law enforcement access to encrypted devices.

Attorney General Bill Barr said Monday that Apple failed to provide "substantive assistance" in unlocking two iPhones in the investigation into the December shooting deaths of three US sailors at a Florida naval station, which he called an "act of terrorism."

Apple disputed Barr's claim, while arguing against the idea of "backdoors" for law enforcement to access its encrypted smartphones.

"We reject the characterization that Apple has not provided substantive assistance in the Pensacola investigation," the company said in a statement.

The US attorney general claimed Apple has failed to provide enough help to unlock iPhones used in a deadly December shooting spree, reviving a debate on law enforcement access to encrypted devices Photo: GETTY IMAGES / JUSTIN SULLIVAN

"Our responses to their many requests since the attack have been timely, thorough and are ongoing."

Late on Tuesday, President Donald Trump weighed in on Twitter, saying the government was helping Apple on trade issues "yet they refuse to unlock phones used by killers, drug dealers and other violent criminal elements."

"They will have to step up to the plate and help our great Country, NOW!" he added.

The standoff highlighted the debate between law enforcement and the tech sector about encryption -- a key way to protect the privacy of digital communications, but which can also make investigations difficult, even with a court order.

The latest battle is similar to the dispute between Apple and the US Justice Department after the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, when the iPhone maker rejected a request to develop software to break into the shooter's iPhone.

Attorney General Bill Barr has called on both Facebook and Apple to provide better access to law enforcement seeking access to encrypted devices and content Photo: GETTY IMAGES / BILL PUGLIANO

That fight ended in 2016 when the government paid an outside party a reported $1 million for a tool that circumvented Apple's iPhone encryption.

Barr last year called on Facebook to allow authorities to circumvent encryption to fight extremism, child pornography and other crimes. The social network has said it would move ahead with strong encryption for its messaging applications.

Digital rights activists argue that any privileged access for law enforcement would weaken security and make it easier for hackers and authoritarian governments to intercept messages.

Apple has been implementing stronger encryption on its iPhones, making it harder for law enforcement to access the devices Photo: AFP / Philip FONG

"We have always maintained there is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys," Apple's statement said.

"Backdoors can also be exploited by those who threaten our national security and the data security of our customers."

Apple and others argue that digital "breadcrumbs" make it increasingly easy to track people, even without breaking into personal devices.

The government's latest demand "is dangerous and unconstitutional, and would weaken the security of millions of iPhones," Jennifer Granick of the American Civil Liberties Union said in a statement.

"Strong encryption enables religious minorities facing genocide, like the Uighurs in China, and journalists investigating powerful drug cartels in Mexico, to communicate safely."

Granick added that Apple cannot allow the FBI access to encrypted communications "without also providing it to authoritarian foreign governments and weakening our defenses against criminals and hackers."

Kurt Opsahl of the Electronic Frontier Foundation echoed that sentiment, saying Apple "is right to provide strong security" for its devices.

"The AG (attorney general) requesting Apple re-engineer its phones to break that security is a poor security trade-off, and imperils millions of innocent people around the globe," Opsahl tweeted.

James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said he believes it's possible to allow law enforcement access without sacrificing encryption.

"You're not weakening encryption, you're making it so it's not end-to-end," Lewis told AFP.

"It means that there's a third party who can look at it under appropriate authority."

But Lewis said he does not expect either side to come out a winner in the battle, and that US officials will likely find another outside party to crack the two iPhones belonging to the shooter, Royal Saudi Air Force 2nd Lieutenant Mohammed Saeed Alshamran, who died in the attack.

"It's a repeat of the movie we saw in San Bernardino," he said.

"It's going to be harder because Apple probably fixed the trick that worked in San Bernardino."

More:
Encryption Battle Reignited As US Govt At Loggerheads With Apple - International Business Times

The encryption wars are alive and well.

On Monday, Attorney General William Barr asked Apple to unlock two iPhones used by the gunman in last month's shooting at a naval air base in Pensacola, FL. President Trump chimed in last night, tweeting that Apple should step up to the plate and unlock the phones.

Apple said it's given law enforcement "all of the data in our possession," meaning the shooter's iCloud account and transaction data. But it won't unlock the phones...because they're encrypted. Apple has enhanced security protections for iPhones so it can't see customer data, and the company has built its entire privacy marketing pitch around this premise.

The government has requested that tech companies add backdoors into their encrypted services to allow law enforcement to peep on their contents if necessary. In October, the U.S., U.K., and Australia asked Facebook to pause plans to build end-to-end encryption into its products.

Tech companies say they can't build backdoors for good guys only. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella weighed in on Monday, calling backdoors "a terrible idea," though he thinks there's another solution.

Next steps:We could see a legal showdown between Apple and the government, the NYT reported, a redux of previously unresolved court battles.

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Encryption Tensions Flare Between U.S. Government and Tech Industry - Morning Brew

A New York Times report claims that Apple is privately preparing for a legal battle with the Justice department over iPhone encryption.

According to the report:

Apple is privately preparing for a legal fight with the Justice Department to defend encryption on its iPhones while publicly trying to defuse the dispute, as the technology giant navigates an increasingly tricky line between its customers and the Trump administration.

Timothy D. Cook, Apple's chief executive, has marshaled a handful of top advisers, while Attorney General William P. Barr has taken aim at the company and asked it to help penetrate two phones used by a gunman in a deadly shooting last month at a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla.

The report further states that executives at Apple "have been surprised by the case's quick escalation", that's according to people familiar with the company who were not authorized to speak publicly. The New York Times also reports that there is "frustration and skepticism" within Apple:

And there is frustration and skepticism among some on the Apple team working on the issue that the Justice Department hasn't spent enough time trying to get into the iPhones with third-party tools, said one person with knowledge of the matter.

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Apple is privately preparing for legal battle with DOJ over iPhone encryption - iMore

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Fortanix Inc., the Runtime Encryption company, today announced it had a record year in 2019, which saw sales climb 285 percent over the previous record year. Important new partnerships with Equinix, Google, IBM and Intel set the stage for both innovation and go-to-market success. The company doubled its workforce and expanded geographically in 2019 with new offices in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to support its growing European customer base and attract engineering talent.

We believe 2020 will mark a turning point for the industry in data protection and privacy, said Ambuj Kumar, CEO, Fortanix. New privacy legislation such as the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), advances in hardware for Runtime Encryption, and cloud service providers partnering with Fortanix will undoubtedly drive accelerated investment and demand for data protection and confidential computing solutions.

Strategic Partnerships

In 2019, Equinix selected the Fortanix Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS), to power Equinix SmartKey HSM-as-a-service. As a result of this collaboration, Equinix SmartKey is available as a global SaaS-based key management and Hardware Security Module (HSM) service hosted on Platform Equinix, Equinixs global interconnection and data center platform. Users gain a solution that is backed by strong SLAs, world-class infrastructure, and connectivity from Equinix.

Fortanix also collaborated with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to integrate its new Google External Key Manager Service with the Fortanix Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) to enable businesses to migrate new classes of sensitive data and applications to the public cloud. The announcement of the new functionality at Google Next London featured PayPal demonstrating their use of the technology.

IBM Cloud Data Shield, powered by Fortanixs Runtime Encryption Platform, in 2019 began offering data-in-use protection for applications. With Runtime Encryption, organizations can now run data-centric workloads with security in the cloud and take advantage of the scale that the cloud provides. Common use cases include securing data-centric workloads such as blockchain, databases, AI/machine learning, and analytics.

Fortanix Secures Key Industry Certifications and Consortium Appointments

Last year, Fortanix earned the Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) 140-2 Level 3 certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. This achievement enables businesses to replace legacy encryption technologies, including Hardware Security Modules (HSM), with the Fortanix SDKMS encryption platform for protecting the most sensitive data in the U.S. Government, and technology, financial services, and healthcare industries.

Fortanix also became an inaugural member of the newly formed Confidential Computing Consortium, an organization created by the Linux Foundation dedicated to accelerating the adoption of technologies to protect data while in use by applications through Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs). Fortanix was elected to leadership positions as both the Chair of the outreach committee and General Members Representative to the Governing Board.

Key Investors and Executives Join Fortanix To Drive Growth

Supporting this years continued expansion, Fortanix in early 2019 announced $23 million in Series B financing, led by new investor Intel Capital with participation by existing investors Foundation Capital and Neotribe. The funding is being used to expand business operations as the company accelerates new product development and customer rollouts to meet growing global demand, including investments in sales and marketing.

The company also saw a significant increase in hiring last year, and expanded operations into Europe. New key executives hired in 2019 included Chief Product and Strategy Officer Faiyaz Shahpurwala, former VP and GM for IBM Cloud; Chief Revenue Officer David Greene, former CEO of ZeroStack; VP of Marketing Seth Knox, former VP of Marketing at Agari; and VP of Customer Success Sameer Phatarpekar, former VP of Global Customer Success at Usermind.

About Fortanix

Fortanixs mission is to solve cloud security and privacy challenges. Fortanix allows customers to securely operate even the most sensitive applications without having to trust the cloud. Fortanix provides unique deterministic security by encrypting applications and data everywhere at rest, in motion, and in use with its Runtime Encryption technology built upon Intel SGX. Fortanix secures F100 customers worldwide and powers IBM Data Shield and Equinix SmartKey HSM-as-a-service. Fortanix is venture backed and headquartered in Mountain View, Calif. For more information, see https://fortanix.com/.

Fortanix and Runtime Encryption are registered trademarks of Fortanix, Inc. Self-Defending Key Management Service is a trademark of Fortanix, Inc. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.

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Fortanix Reports Record Year with Sales Growing 285 Percent, Strategic Partnerships and Global Expansion in 2019 - Business Wire