4 ms·

Conceptually that makes sense to me but if you're already locked out of the phone how would you access the memory in the first place?

• WJW 6y ago
  Open up the phone, solder leads to the memory bus? EDIT: If you can access the real time clock chip and set the clock to a point in the future where the lockout has elapsed, that might work as well.
  • dboreham 6y ago
    No. The memory in question is inside a special chip designed explicitly for the purpose of not allowing easy access.
    • WJW 6y ago
      Not allowing "easy" access is not the same as "no" access though. I could easily imagine a radar/MRI imaging system generating instructions for a cnc drilling rig that would make micrometer accurate holes through the chip packaging, then inserting extremely precise probes directly into the wires inside the package. I could also imagine a team of 5-10 engineers making such a system in a year (total costs <10 million), with 20-50 million in off-the-shelf hardware costs as a pessimistic estimate. As a company, you then "only" have to amortize this cost over 20 countries each wishing to crack the phones of 5 phones of high-profile criminals and/or dissidents each to get to an average cost of 600k per phone. It would easily be worth that much to the US to crack the phone of a high profile drug lord. Long story short, private companies (even with as much resources as Apple) either need watertight mathematical proofs of security or accept that they stand no chance at all against nation state adversaries.