14 DAY TRIAL // Apple is believed to be working on a new, more secure iPhone that would be impossible to hack, even by the company itself, and it appears that the firm has already started hiring new employees for the project.
As BI reports, Apple has recently hired Frederic Jacobs, one of the developers working on the encrypted chat service called Signal, which has been praised several times by none other than NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
“I'm delighted to announce that I accepted an offer to be working with the CoreOS security team at Apple this summer,” Jacobs has revealed in a tweet.
More secure communications on the iPhone
While specifics are not available at this point, it’s believed that Jacobs could work on encrypted communications systems on the iPhone as Apple is planning to fix all security holes of its device in order to prevent further demands from the government to break into its devices.
In addition, Apple is reportedly searching for new engineers for several other positions, all of them related to security projects for the iPhone, including a hardware security architect.
“We are looking for candidates with strong security experience spanning both hardware and software, especially for mobile devices. The candidate will work with a cross-functional engineering team to create, define and verify security systems,” the job ad reads. Responsibilities include “prototyping of various HW and SW security related situations, analysis of HW and SW attack mechanism, architect attack mitigations, and develop evaluation plans for both HW and SW.”
Apple is opposing a government order forcing the company to develop custom software that could help the FBI break into an iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino attackers. This specially developed software, which Apple claims “it doesn’t have right now,” is supposed to provide the FBI with unlimited passcode entry attempts that would eventually allow for brute-force password cracking.