Apple Removes Post Containing iPhone Encryption Key By Using The DMCA

Source: Apple

On Tuesday, Apple caught wind of a tweet containing an iPhone encryption key and quickly resorted to using the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to have it removed.

A security researcher, only known as Siguza shared the encryption key early on December 8th. As reported by Vice, the encryption key could be used to reverse engineer iPhone’s Secure Enclave Processor, which stores sensitive data and handles data encryption.

Apple was quick to nip this in the bud. On Tuesday, a law firm working with Apple confirmed that the company had reached out to Twitter for the removal of the tweet. Twitter removed the thread originating from Siguza. However, not two days later did the original tweet reappear. Siguza later posted that the DMCA claim was retracted.

According to Vice, Apple confirmed that a DMCA claim was sent but was quickly retracted, however, Twitter had already removed the tweet. Apple then asked Twitter to recover Siguza’s tweet.



Reddit was also a subject of DMCA claims doled out by Apple recently. The popular subreddit for hackers and security researchers known as r/jailbreak received several copyright claims according to a moderator post. While at this time there is no concrete confirmation this was done in part by Apple, the timing may suggest that the company was attempting to crack down on the jailbreaker community.

Apple has long been trying to curb the ongoing jailbreaking of the iPhone. For quite a while, there was no way to jailbreak the iPhone until earlier this year. Recently, a jailbreak technique for older iPhone running iOS 13 was uncovered.