Another NSA leak revealed that the CIA was trying to undermine the encryption used in iPhones and insert secret surveillance backdoors into applications. Surveillance methods were presented at NSA’s secret annual conference dubbed “jamboree”.

The most worrying effort was the creation of a dummy version of Apple’s development software called Xcode. The latter is normally used by developers all over the world to create apps for iOS. Apparently, the modified version of Xcode would allow the surveillance agencies to insert surveillance backdoors into any mobile app created in it. This leak may prompt security audits among Apple developers to find out if they used compromised software or not.

The sad part is that sustained hacking efforts against Apple devices, very popular in the United States and all over the world, continue to strain difficult relations between Apple and the American government. Although Apple used to be a partner in the notorious Prism program (a kind of a legal backdoor to get user data by the secret agencies), the company then has stepped up efforts to protect user privacy. This is when it launched its own encryption in iMessages.

This “jamboree” also revealed the attempts to use keylogger software, i.e. the one that records and transmits everything a victim types, into systems via Apple’s software update tool. Finally, a sophisticated approach to breaking encryption was revealed, which used the activity pattern of the phone processor while it is encrypting data in order to gain access to the core software the iPhone runs.

These are not the only activities of intelligence agency against Apple: a year ago, a variety of exploits were revealed that the NSA and its fellows used against mobile phones.