China to go for Security Audits for the Apple Software

In Beijing, according to a news report, Apple has allowed its software to be checked by the China security audits before using. It is an assumption that China wants to check for possible backdoors in the software, though Apple has totally denied the chances of having any backdoors in the past and present.

China has taken this decision because there are other foreign countries also who have lost trust on the American companies as it was discovered from Snowden’s NSA documents that tech companies either willingly cooperate or have their software and networks hacked so American intelligence agencies can spy on other foreign nations.

As this information has made many countries worried, a few companies are coming up with the laws which force the foreign companies to keep the data they have on their citizens in a local database. But passing this law in all countries is not possible as this becomes expensive for those companies to operate, so they may just cancel all kinds of business with the countries and end up leaving the country. But mainly these kinds of laws are used by the countries so that the government can access the data on their citizens easily.

Auditing the proprietary software of all foreign companies is not an easy task to do as it can be very time consuming and cost effective. In the process not only must the whole OS be studied with all of its intricacies, but also every single update from that point forward. So the government has to support this system keeping all this in mind.

As the adoption of open source solutions can be another solution for this matter, China has started collaborating with Canonical on a Chinese version of Ubuntu, so in a way it’s also leading the charge in open source adoption for government use. Many countries believe that the combination of open source solutions and security audits can provide maximum security to the countries’ data and institutions.