This is sounding a lot like Apple trying desperately to avoid admitting that they’ve added their own secret backdoors and they don’t want their users to know.
If Apple had been using seeing encryption, as they should have been, they’d just have said that they were unable to recover the data.
That’s exactly what Apple has been saying. They CAN’T unlock the phone’s data. There is no back door.
And Apple is also saying that if they ARE compelled to implement the back door, that’s about as secure as just leaving the data unlocked.
Apple has no, zero, nada, way in after iOS 7. That is the argument, the gummint wants in with iOS 7 (who is using that any more?)
iOS 8, 9, and all future versions are inaccessible to ANYONE including Apple.
That is exactly what Apple has been telling the courts. . . That Apple does not have any backdoors nor do they have the means to get to any of the data in a passcode protected iOS 8 or later. Apple itself cannot access any of the user data in such devices. . . so how can they help the DOJ get access to the data? If they can't, neither can the DOJ. Even on iOS 7, Apple has only limited access to specific data with limited usefulness.
If an user were to select a 16 character complex passcode, which can use any of the 223 characters accessible from the alphanumeric/symbol keyboard, which will then be entangled with the 128 character UUID of the device to construct the actual key for the encryption. While it is not "impossible" to break into such an AES encryption by the only means possible without the key, brute force trial-and-error of every possible key, practically it is, because to try every possible key using the fastest super-computer available to us today, which is capable of attempting 3 Trillion keys a year, would only take a mere 5.62 undecillion years (5.62 X 10195 years) to try all possible keys. I think the DOJ would lose interest in a few million years, don't you?
WTF?
Did you not read the excerpt where the apple rep said they thought it would be “nearly impossible” for them to decrypt the information.
How you would equate that to a “secret backdoor” I have no clue?