India Says It Can Hack iPhones Too

India’s telecom minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has revealed that the country have developed solutions to break into smartphones with strong encryption systems, including Apple’s iPhones, following reports that technology companies might refuse to help authorities by unlocking their devices.

This is becoming a serious problem for Apple, India is the third country after the United States and China that is looking into ways to break into its devices. The United States has already unlocked iPhones 5c and 5s that were involved in criminal activities, while China is believed to have requested access to the iOS source code, a request that Apple has already denied.

The telecom minister said that the country does not want tobattle with problems such as those in the United States where Apple is refusing to help the FBI in criminal investigations by unlocking its phones, so it has developed its own solution to hack these devices.

“Smartphones including phones by Apple employ strong encryption to secure the data stored and to protect the communication. Such Encryption technologies has challenges to Law Enforcement Agencies throughout the world including India. As part of this, a simple tool for Mobile forensics has been developed by India, which handles smartphones including Apple phones,” Prasad  quoted as saying by TOI.

The telecom minister hasn’t nominated the phones that can be unlocked with this tool, so it’s unknown whether India can hack iPhone 6 and 6s too. Following FBI’s successful unlocking of iPhone 5s and 5c models, it was stated that the former iPhone models are the most encrypted and cannot be hacked at the moment.Though India does not plan to force tech companies to install back doors on their smartphones in order to help bypass encryption should this be needed, but it goes without saying that tech companies would have quickly opposed such a proposal.

India, however, is a hostile market for Apple, although the company is trying to benefit from the local demand for iPhones in different ways. Earlier this week, the firm has been blocked from bringing refurbished iPhones in the country to sell them locally on grounds that such a move would have a significant environmental impact and affect sales of companies that have set production facilities in India.