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If Apple can take the phone and unlock it with the tools and knowledge at their disposal, then they have a backdoor for it. The distinction that you're drawing
by marcoperaza 10y ago
If Apple can take the phone and unlock it with the tools and knowledge at their disposal, then they have a backdoor for it. The distinction that you're drawing is meaningless.
- tremon 10y agoA backdoor is typically reserved for solutions that bypass the existing security. As I understood it, the only thing Apple could do was provide a firmware without rate limiting. This would have allowed the FBI to perform an exhaustive search for the key. We already know that brute-forcing a key is always possible, that's not a new way to bypass security.
- marcoperaza 10y agoNo, brute forcing a pin is not supposed to be possible. And yes, it was always possible, but only if you have Apple's secrets. A short PIN is only secure because of rate-limiting. Loading a firmware without rate-limiting is effectively hacking the phone. Apple possessed backdoor to phones that have a short PIN. The FBI was simply asking Apple to walk through a door that Apple created (perhaps unwittingly) for themselves. The case had nothing to do with forcing Apple to backdoor their products, which would mean mandated vulnerabilities that Apple is forced to ship phones with. Apple can, and apparently is, designing future phones to not be vulnerable to this flaw. TPM chips, widely used in PCs, are not vulnerable to such an attack because the rate-limiting is done in the TPM hardware itself.