WSJ corroborates earlier reports: Apple working on stronger iCloud encryption, balancing privacy against user experience

The Wall Street Journal is corroborating several reports from February that Apple is working on new iCloud backup encryption methods that will prevent it from being able to decrypt data without a passcode. Right now, although iCloud backups are encrypted, they are not entangled with a user passcode. This means law enforcement can get access to user content with ease; Apple has complied with thousands of these requests in the past for a variety of court cases.

Apple wants to re-engineer the iCloud backup system so even if law enforcement asked Apple to hand over such information in future, it would be impossible to decrypt without the correct passcode also being supplied at time of retrieval.