The automatic thing is just an automatic exploit of the same issue[0] (forcefully cutting power rather than powering off with the buttons might make it more rel

The automatic thing is just an automatic exploit of the same issue[0] (forcefully cutting power rather than powering off with the buttons might make it more reliable.) It's called an iPBOX and AFAICT it doesn't support iOS 8.1.1[1], when the issue was fixed. Other commentors have pointed out that the PIN/crypto stuff is handled by dedicated hardware designed to resist tampering, probably pretty much state-of-the-art. The issue before was a software issue. Now that it's fixed it's very hard to completely hack the hardware and would have to be done to each phone individually: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10424439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10424439 I'm not an expert, but I imagine intercepting the signal would be just as hard, as the signal is contained within one tiny chip and it might not even be possible to reliably modify a circuit on that scale. You can't just replace the chip with a no-PIN version either, because it contains a unique crypto key to the data you presumably want from the phone. This also makes modifying the chip difficult, because if you screw up you could lose the key. [0] https://www.mdsec.co.uk/2015/03/apple-ios-hardware-assisted-screenlock-bruteforce/ https://www.mdsec.co.uk/2015/03/apple-ios-hardware-assisted-... [1] http://forum.gsmhosting.com/vbb/10720367-post1.html http://forum.gsmhosting.com/vbb/10720367-post1.html