Apple took down a tweet with an iPhone encryption key using the DMCA

Apple and the security community in general have not seen eye-to-eye in the past, and it looks like the two entities are butting heads again, this time over a tweet.

As reported byMotherboard today, it looks like Apple recently used the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to get a tweet taken down from the social network Twitter. That tweet in question apparently contained an iPhone encryption key, which was sent out by security researcher “Siguza”.

According to the report, that iPhone encryption key could have been used to reverse engineer he iPhone’s embedded Secure Enclave. That particular feature handles encryption on the device, so that’s obviously something that Apple would not want floating around out there in the wild.

The original tweet was sent out on December 7. It took a law firm working with Apple only two days to send out the DMCA takedown notice, which was received by Twitter. The social network removed the tweet soon after receiving the request from Apple.

Interestingly enough, after Apple requested the original tweet get taken down, it subsequently requested to put the tweet back. And now, Siguza’s original tweet is back on the platform. You can find it here.

Apple’s stance on the jailbreaking community has always been one of begrudging acceptance, basically understanding that the community exists, and that some individuals out there are going to work very hard to bypass the standard features Apple launches to the public. So it’s not surprising to hear that Apple has apparently also been sending out DMCA claims to Reddit as well, focused on the community r/jailbreak.

Up until the release of “checkra1n”, there wasn’t any jailbreaking software for modern devices. But that’s no longer the case — even if it doesn’t work on devices released to the public in 2018 or 2019. It will work on older handsets running iOS 13, though.

Apple going down this particular road to clamp down on this sort of thing is not surprising in the slightest, right?