Talking out of my ass, how?
All I’m saying is that the Feds under Obama have ways of getting Apple to water down their encryption technology to the point that the Feds can utilize it for nefarious purposes.
Apple created the technology. So it can’t be undone or reversed?
From a capitalist perspective, I like Apple. But they drank the Obama kool-aid so the Hell with them.
There are two major ways encryption can be "watered down". One way is to use an algorithm that is readily broken. If Apple were using a weak algorithm, it would be evident; lots of really good experts know these algorithms inside out, they know what the results look like, and they'd call Apple on it posthaste. The other way is to engineer a back door of some kind. The difficulty there is that the customer's private key is not known to anyone but the customer, by definition of how it's done, and you'd need to know that. Any back door that can get around the use of a good long private key will be so obvious that any of these security researchers would have found it long since.
Private keys are... private, unless the person who has it lets it loose. And in the case of Apple's encryption -- as I understand it -- the private key, encrypted by its passphrase, is only known to the customer who makes it. An encrypted private key, for example a 2048-bit or 4096-bit RSA key, with a passphrase of say 14 characters, is simply unbreakable in our or our children's lifetimes. That's what PGP/GnuPG typically relies on, and in the 20+ years that PGP has been around, nobody has been able to demonstrate a flaw in it. And a lot of people a lot smarter in this stuff than I am have tried mighty hard.
> Apple created the technology. So it can’t be undone or reversed?
To the best of my knowledge, Apple is using technology that's publicly available: 256 bit AES. Their particular implementation details may be unique, but the inner core algorithms are standard. They have to be -- nobody would trust a proprietary "new" encryption algorithm these days. I don't know the exact names/methods of Apple's algorithms; I'm gonna have to research that, or maybe Swordmaker knows :-) But I can virtually guarantee that they didn't invent some new one. Cryptographers all over would be rightly concerned and sounding the alarm over that. Cryptography is hard stuff, and Apple would only be compromising their own trustworthiness if they tried to invent some new crypto scheme.
I'm gonna invite Swordmaker to comment. If I'm full of crap about how Apple is doing this, he'll call me out on it, and I would deserve and appreciate the correction.