The cat-and-mouse fight to fix — and exploit — iPhone's security flaws by Respect Blues ~ Sportty

The cat-and-mouse fight to fix — and exploit — iPhone's security flaws by Respect Blues

In early April, the police department in Rochester, Minnesota, bought an obscure piece of technology that would allow its investigators to break into iPhones, joining a growing number of police agencies that have hired hacking companies to help bypass Apple security in their search for evidence of crimes.

The city’s detectives didn’t get much time to use it.

This week, Apple released an update that patched the security gap that allowed the technology to work — shutting down a technique used by the FBI to unlock a cellphone left behind in the 2015 terror attack in San Bernardino, California, and since adopted by federal, state and local police in an array of cases, from murder to child porn to drugs.

But the patch won’t slow the relentless pursuit among hackers and law enforcement agencies to pry data out of Americans’ everyday devices — and tech companies’ attempts to thwart those exploits.

“It’s a cat-and-mouse game,” said John Sherwin, Rochester’s interim police chief and head of the department’s investigative division.

His department spent $15,000 for technology developed by a secretive firm called Grayshift that can access an iPhone’s data through its charging port. Apple’s fix cut that path off.

And yet Sherwin said he wasn’t too concerned. That’s because his department uses a variety of other “forensic tools” to access devices and Grayshift — or some other company — will probably come up with another method to break through, he said.

“There’s always going to be someone to figure a way around it,” Sherwin said.