For most of the past four years, Apple has been boasting that its devices are not only safer than PCs, but that hackers will not specifically target its operating system to create threats because they are much more secure. For this reason, Apple often rejects proposals from law enforcement agencies to share solutions so that the police can access mobile phones.
The reason Apple continues to refuse is that it will weaken its ability to keep the safest personal computing devices safe. Federal law enforcement officials continue to develop their own solutions, and the results of the investigation may surprise many Apple fans. Let’s take a look:
After years of trying to gain access through Apple, they finally found it in 2020. In 2021, cryptographers published “Data Security on Mobile Devices: Current State of Technology, Unresolved Issues, and Proposed Solutions”, a position paper aimed at answering three questions:
1. What security measures currently exist to prevent access to unauthorized users?
2. How do modern devices allow unauthorized access?
3. How to improve mobile security to prevent unauthorized access?
Researchers looked at the newer Android and iOS platforms and found that none of them has more effective security preparations than the other. In fact, anyone with the appropriate equipment and interests can access the operating system on any device. This may shock those who have always praised the indestructibility of Apple devices.
Before throwing your iPhone into the trash can, researchers “discovered a powerful and compelling set of security and privacy controls in iOS, supported and supported by strong encryption”, but the frequency of use of these tools was not enough to ensure Maintain safety.
Compared with Apple, Android’s problems have become worse because of the large number of manufacturers that make Android products. They found that many devices lacked communication with Google, resulting in slow updates of some devices and inconsistent security and privacy controls.
These are just hardware and software vulnerabilities. In the rest of the report, the researchers detailed the specific vulnerabilities of each platform.
Weaknesses of Apple Devices
One of the best features of the iPhone is that it allows users to store data safely in iCloud. According to the researchers in this report, this is not all data owned by Apple. When activated, iCloud controls many other data sent to Apple, which can be accessed by all different types of entities, including hackers and law enforcement agencies.
This problem is more complicated, because the defense measures proposed by Apple are not as effective as originally thought. The analysis of this relationship led the researchers to hypothesize that tools that have existed since 2018 allow attackers to bypass the built-in protections to guess user passwords.
Weaknesses: Android devices
On the other hand, researchers found that Android’s local data protection has some serious problems. An example of this can be found in Android’s lack of Apple’s full protection encryption, which makes Android more vulnerable to damage. This is why the FBI can effectively access data from any platform without the help of developers.
Conclusion
In the end, these two mobile operating systems are more prone to data leakage than any manufacturer is willing to admit. Assuming that your data is safe is never a good practice; especially the default data protection that developers have. It just proves that there is no insurmountable security, and users (or organizations) must actively accept these results and do what they need to do to protect their data more effectively.
You need to use the mobile device management platform to manage these devices and have your employees register for the “bring your own device” policy. In this way, your organization can cover in ways that are simply not possible on personal devices and mobile platforms.