Apple hires crypto veteran after Blackphone

Apple has hired crypto veteran Jon Callas. Callas is co-founder of, among others, Silent Circle and of the subsidiary behind the Blackphone. He had worked for the Cupertino group twice before.

An Apple spokesperson has confirmed Callas’s hiring to Reuters. What the security expert will do at Apple has not been disclosed. The importance of good encryption implementation has increased at the manufacturer after the FBI’s summons to bypass the security of an iPhone 5c. Apple refused that. In the end, the FBI itself bought a tool to crack the security, without disclosing this method.

Callas worked at Apple from 1995 to 1997 as a Senior Scientist II, and from 2009 to 2011, he worked on encryption for Mac systems. In the late 1990s, he was employed by PGP Inc. and he used the experience he gained there to develop the OpenPGP standard and later found the company PGP Corporation.

In 2012, Callas co-founded Silent Circle, the Switzerland-based company focused on encrypted communications. Here, crypto veteran founded SGP Technologies to develop the fully privacy-focused smartphone Blackphone.