Oh cmon sport. You know the key length is crucial. Short key lengths of say 128bits haven’t been considered secure for at least 20 years. I started out in military crypto. I’ve forgotten more than you know.
You still haven't proved a thing, driftdiver. . . and you should be ashamed of what you tried to pull off! Your talking about short passcodes as a key for encryption is merely an attempt to muddy the waters on this discussion on the iPhone's encryption.
Of course a 128bit/16 character passcode that IS the key for the encryption could be broken very quickly by brute force. . . unless there was an enforced wait period between tries.
It would be especially easy if you limit your choices of characters to alphanumeric.
However, allow use of all 233 characters accessible from the virtual keyboard on an iPhone, and you are looking at 16233 possible keys to test and I think you might find your putative "Chinese guy" would take a tad longer than 15 minutes, even with a fast computer.
But who is talking about 128 bits? Not me. Not Apple.
128 BITS is not the same thing as a hidden UUID plus a GID which combines to make a minimum of 128 CHARACTERS before the user's passcode is entangled with them. That's 1024 bits! And it still isn't the complete KEY that is used to encrypt the data on an iPhone or iPad.
You don't seem to have a clue what we are talking about in this context.
So, in other words, your claim that 256 bit AES encryption being hacked was a special case of the use of brute force on a SIMPLE passcode, not an actual hacking of the encryption. . . but rather a solving of a known password size, which was done by someone who actually knew in advance the password size and parameters.
You obviously tossed that little gem out in the discussion to deliberately denigrate the actual security of 256 bit AES encryption without explaining that it was a special case, not a general overall hacking of all cases. RIGHT.
You wanted to obfuscate the encryption issue and make people think 256 bit AES encryption is not secure because it could be easily hacked in a mere 15 minutes. . . yet you attacked me and claim I went overboard for calling you out on this piece of dishonesty???? Who exactly tried to distort the record here?