Remember the case in July when it became known that the UK might have to ban iMessage and FaceTime?
It was first published August 24.
Updated Sept. 6, 5:50 p.m.:
The UK has chosen not to implement legislation that would have meant Apple withdrawing iMessage from the country, at least not yet. The Financial Times reported that the authorities do not want to introduce the new regulations until it becomes “technically possible.”
What does the UK do?
“Apple is very skeptical about a potential new law in the UK that would require Apple to install backdoors so authorities in the country can snoop on criminals’ iPhones. If they choose to do something like this, Apple says they have no choice but to give up iMessage and FaceTime,” we wrote about the somewhat strange security measures in the country at the time, but it didn’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 reported, the problem is simply that British authorities want access to security flaws in devices in order to “monitor criminals.” If Google or Apple fix such vulnerabilities, they will no longer have access to potential criminals they investigate.
Not only will customers likely have to wait for the government to obtain a secure iPhone or Android device, which is a major security concern, but manufacturers will have to rewrite their apps from scratch, exemplified here by Meta’s move to E2E encryption:
“It quickly became clear to us that moving to E2EE was going to be an incredibly complex and difficult engineering puzzle. We would have to rewrite the entire messaging and chat code base almost from scratch.
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