The battle between Apple and the FBI the latter’s requests for a skeleton key into the iPhone may be subject to a truce for now, but there are rumblings on the horizon.

In March, the FBI announced that it was dropping its court case to compel Apple to help it unlock the iPhone of the San Bernardino shooter, saying it managed to crack the phone in question with the help of a third-party.

How the FBI managed to do it is still a major topic of discussion, but as the old saying goes ‘loose lips sink ships’. The secret to cracking the iPhone could be revealed in the very near future – and that is bad news for both Apple and the FBI.

In recent days there have reportedly been more requests from state and local police forces to the FBI to unlock similar devices – and that is where the problem comes in.

For the FBI, it becomes a problem as Apple will know how to patch the process, and it is troublesome for Apple as the FBI will have unbridled access to personal information, which is the reason Apple refused to open the phone for the FBI in the first place.

“The FBI would need to resign itself to the fact that such an exploit would only be viable for a few months, if released to other departments. It would be a temporary Vegas jackpot that would quickly get squandered on the case backlog,” Jonathan Zdziarski, an independent forensics expert, explained to The Huffington Post.

That might be the case, but the FBI is open to all other suggestions on how to crack phones in the future.

“As has been our longstanding policy, the FBI will of course consider any tool that might be helpful to our partners. Please know that we will continue to do everything we can to help you consistent with our legal and policy constraints,” reads a memo from the FBI’s Assistant Director in the Office of Partner Engagement, Kerry Sleeper.

For the time being the FBI has access to almost any iPhone it needs to gather information from, but as a senior Apple engineer told The Huffington Post, “flaws of this nature have a pretty short life cycle. Most of these things do come to light.”