One of the reasons why many users and companies used BlackBerry devices back in the day along with services like BBM is because of its security. Back then BBM offered up encryption as a security measure to prevent messages and emails from being intercepted and read by hackers, but fast forward to today, encryption is pretty much expected of all messaging and email apps/services.Unfortunately for Apple, it seems that iMessage’s encryption just wasn’t as strong as they would have liked. Researchers at John Hopkins have recently managed to break the encryption on iMessage, which in turn allows hackers to be able to intercept and read a message that is being delivered to its recipient.
Apparently this flaw is rooted in the way iMessage encrypts itself, and how it is sent through Apple’s servers. Thankfully this isn’t the doom and gloom situation that it is made out to be. Apple has since been notified and are apparently happy with the researchers reporting on the flaw. Even better news is that they have since addressed the problem and the patch is expected in the iOS 9.3 update.
In the meantime with the whole debate about encryption going on, the researcher who discovered it, Matthew Green, said, “Even Apple, with all their skills – and they have terrific cryptographers – wasn’t able to quite get this right. So it scares me that we’re having this conversation about adding back doors to encryption when we can’t even get basic encryption right.”