AlphaAtlas
[H]ard|Gawd
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Apple has received both praise and criticism for their efforts to secure iDevices from everyone and everything, including law enforcement. Now, Motherboard reports that Rene Mayrhofer, Google's Director of Android Platform Security, is saying that Google is following in Apple's footsteps with Android. At a recent security conference, he said "We want to make it impossible for insiders to get this kind of access for whatever reasons, whatever motivation," and that "the inability to react to legal requests here is an unintended side effect of this mitigation." According to Mayrhofer, with Android's recently announced security measures, not even a Google insider could push out malicious updates to Pixel 3 devices.
Even if the government did force Google to push a malicious update in order to access a phone, the user's personal data-and the keys that encrypt their data-will be wiped or made inaccessible, according to Mayrhofer. After Mayrhofer's talk, Ashkan Soltani, an independent researcher and former FTC chief technology officer, asked him whether Google was going "the Apple route" and making it harder for the feds and Google itself to write custom software to access user's data. "The risk for insider attack in the long chain, in the whole ecosystem is-I think-currently bigger than the few cases where legitimate law enforcement access would happen to have to break the chain," Mayrhofer said.
Even if the government did force Google to push a malicious update in order to access a phone, the user's personal data-and the keys that encrypt their data-will be wiped or made inaccessible, according to Mayrhofer. After Mayrhofer's talk, Ashkan Soltani, an independent researcher and former FTC chief technology officer, asked him whether Google was going "the Apple route" and making it harder for the feds and Google itself to write custom software to access user's data. "The risk for insider attack in the long chain, in the whole ecosystem is-I think-currently bigger than the few cases where legitimate law enforcement access would happen to have to break the chain," Mayrhofer said.