You said: > If it's short enough that you're willing to type it every time you touch your phone, then it can probably be cracked very easily by cloning your fl

You said: > If it's short enough that you're willing to type it every time you touch your phone, then it can probably be cracked very easily by cloning your flash storage and brute-forcing in parallel. That doesn't work with a unique hardware key. Being clearer since you missed it the first time: the attack you describe does not work on the iPhone. Nobody is proposing that FOSS is a security panacea: FOSS would still have to run on hardware with a hardware key to achieve similar password security. But if such FOSS existed, it could be more secure than the iPhone can be, because it would be immune to the attack that the FBI is attempting.