Once the FBI has a backdoor into your smartphone, everyone does Share This Home News Newswire Once the FBI has a backdoor into your smartphone, everyone does FBI director James Comey believes tech companies should be forced to insert back doors to bypass encryption on smartphones. But experts say once that happen,s security is moot and anyone can breach your privacy. <\/p>\n
FBI director James Comey said this week thattech companies should not be allowed to put cryptographic locks on mobile devices so they can't be accessed by U.S. intelligence agencies. <\/p>\n
Comey, speaking at the Brookings Institute yesterday, criticized reactions by Apple and Google in the post-Edward Snowden era to offer encryption on iPhone and Android smartphones. <\/p>\n
Comey said locking the government out of mobile devices with encryption will endanger criminal investigations and national security because bad guys will be able to operate in a \"black hole.\" <\/p>\n
He also suggested the Obama administration may seek regulations to force tech companies to offer a backdoor for the government to unlock data stored on the smartphones. \"Perhaps it's time to suggest that the post-Snowden pendulum has swung too far in one direction -- in a direction of fear and mistrust,\" Comey said. \"Are we so mistrustful of government -- and of law enforcement -- that we are willing to let bad guys walk away?\" <\/p>\n
The problem with giving the government a backdoor into smartphones and other electronics is that it also opens them up to the bad guys, according to experts. <\/p>\n
\"Backdoors are nice, but they're exploitable. If we were to allow the FBI to have a backdoor, it would only be matter of time that someone who was not sanctioned by government would find their way into that door,\" said Jon Tanguy, senior technical marketing engineer from Micron, a maker of solid-state drives (SSDs). <\/p>\n
Tanguy pointed out that not only are hackers smart and able to find backdoors, but any employee of a tech company who'd been involved in encryption deployment would be able to share that information. <\/p>\n
Micron has standardized around self-encrypting drives (SEDs) for laptops and desktops for the past three years. The company is preparing to release SEDs for data centers, and it has refused to put in backdoors because doing so would essentially disable the government-grade AES 256-bit encryption on the drives. <\/p>\n
Micron is not alone. Several solid-state drive (SSD) makers, including Intel, Samsung and Seagate, have chosen the Trusted Computing Groups Opal 2.0 AES 256-bit encryption specification to lock down products. The spec allows users to lock away data so securely that even a supercomputer would need years, if not decades, to crack the passcode. <\/p>\n
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