A Belgian makes it impossible to unblock an iPhone!

04/03/2016

He is not yet 25 years old and he is already one of the most respected experts in cryptography: Frédéric Jacobs, known over the past few years for his work on data breaches at the Belgian State railway company, the Société nationale des chemins de fer belges (SNCB). He has just accepted Apple's offer to join the CoreOS security team next summer.

The American group is currently involved in a power struggle with the FBI, which is asking it to unblock the iPhone of Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the people behind the killings in San Bernardino, California, last December, when 14 people lost their lives.

The risk of losing this fight against the FBI has led Apple to work on reinforcing the security of its services.  Up against the FBI, which wants a tool that makes it possible to get around the internal security of iOS, Apple has decided to hire the young man from Brussels, an expert in cryptography.

Over the past two and a half years, Frédéric Jacobs has worked as a security developer at Open Whisper Systems, the company which created Signal encrypted messaging. He then worked on the encryption of the Signal app for iOS. This has experienced great success and is even seen by many to be one of the few encrypted messaging apps to obtain such high scores in the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights defence group.

By joining the security team for CoreOs, a layer of software containing low-level features between the equipment and the iOS operating system, Frédéric Jacobs will be directly involved in the iPhone's encryption systems.