As many have noticed, Apple has released their new lineup of laptops, software, OSes, and iPhones. As I watched live coverage of the keynotes on Monday (thanks Gizmodo) – a few things caught my attention when they were speaking about the new iPhone 3G S.
The first thing that caught my eye was the mention of “hardware encryption.” Now, simply mentioning that a device supports hardware encryption can mean a lot of things, and Apple isn’t very clear about what they mean by this. Trying to do some further research didn’t help much either as I only ended up being further confused with all the different mentions of this “hardware encryption.” The official word from Apple is…

iPhone 3G S offers highly secure hardware encryption that enables instantaneous remote wipe. You can even encrypt your iTunes backups.

…according to that, it would sound like the remote wipe is dependent on the hardware encryption, which makes me believe that instead of actually wiping the data (as in a format), it would simply delete the private key – therefore making the data inaccessible. (Since iTunes stores a backup of all your iPhone data at every sync, securing this also seems important.)  This also assumes it’s using a strong form of encryption. I’ve also read in other posts…

…hardware encryption for Exchange users…

…as the listed feature. Does this mean it’s only available through Exchange, and at what level is it being used? Is it only securing your email? We know the iTunes songs and videos are already being encrypted on the device. Is this the same form of encryption they’re talking about?  We’ve asked an insider at Apple to help us out with some of these questions and are still awaiting a response.

All of this brings up major questions about the REAL security behind all these marketing terms. How much do companies actually care about security, and how much do they actually do to help protect their users? Is everything just a marketing ploy these days?

Users were upset about the lack of security in our last model of product X. Let’s add minor revisions and throw some good marketing verbiage in the features list and hope that fixes everything.

Is this how security is being treated? Apple isn’t the only company being vague about these types of issues; it rolls all across the board. They just happen to be the ones asking for the most attention at his current point in time.  Stay tuned as I hope to find and relay some answers to many of these questions as more details are revealed.