Johns Hopkins team cracks iMessage photo, video encryption

A Johns Hopkins team has decrypted iMessage photos by guessing character-by-character the key used to encrypt it, and Apple plans to release a new iOS version today that will fix the flaw.

Upgrading to iOS 9.3 should fix the problem for users of the operating system and iMessage, says Matthew Green, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins who led a team of grad students that broke the encryption, according to a story in the Washington Post.

The story says he discovered a flaw in the encryption last fall and told Apple about it, but when months went by and nothing was done to patch it, he turned his team loose. Here’s how the Post describes the attack:

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