Remember the case in July when it became known that the UK might have to block iMessage and FaceTime?
What does the UK do?
“Apple is very skeptical about a possible new law in the UK that would require Apple to install backdoors so authorities in the country can snoop into criminals’ iPhones. If they choose to do something like this, Apple says they have no other choice but to stop iMessage and FaceTime,” we wrote about the somewhat strange security measures in the country at the time, but it doesn’t stop there.
For now, the country is proposing it Security updates will need to be approved by the authorities Before it was introduced by companies to protect users’ devices:
“It is also likely that device manufacturers will have to notify authorities before critical security updates that fix known vulnerabilities and secure devices are made available. Accordingly, the Secretary of State, having received this advance notice, could now require operators, for example Refrain from patching security holes to allow authorities to maintain access for surveillance purposes.
“It is not a closed hole that our electronic service exploits”
As Just Security puts it, the problem is simply that the UK authorities want access to security flaws in devices in order to “monitor criminals”. If Google or Apple fix such vulnerabilities, they will not have access to the potential criminals they are investigating.
Not only will customers likely have to wait until the government gets a secure iPhone or Android device, which is a huge security concern, but manufacturers will have to rewrite their apps from scratch, which is exemplified here by Meta’s move to E2E encryption:
“It quickly became clear to us that moving to E2EE would be an incredibly complex and difficult engineering puzzle. We would have to rewrite almost the entire messaging and conversational codebase from scratch.
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