Sword fancies himself as the authority on everything Apple and perhaps he come close to this but he is not the authority on Apple vs its competitors. He is too blinded by his fanboyism which you have experienced in major torrents and lots worse than I ever have. Partly due to Sword I will not buy anything Apple but Tim Cooks gay propagandizing also figures in.Yes, and he's demonstrated time and again that he'll misrepresent the facts in order to try and bully others into his viewpoint. For example, a little while back I was discussing with him the bad-PIN lockout feature, and Apple's ability or inability to disable it on one particular phone. Now I am relatively familiar with this space, as it directly intersects my work, and I know that Apple has released very little detail about the A9 chip. What is out there is largely speculation from industry pundits. So immediately I was suspicious of his bold, absolute statements about how the algorithm was implemented in silicon.
I also know, being someone that does chip design, that it is very unlikely that an engineer would hard-code into the silicon the number of PIN attempts that were allowed. It's just the kind of thing that someone is likely going to want to change, even the sort of thing an enterprise organization will want to set as a policy for all their users. If it's hard coded in the chip design (as opposed to a programmable, settable thing), you are stuck with it forever on that generation of the device. What you WILL put in the silicon are the sorts of things necessary to bootstrap a secure code environment (i.e., equivalent of the TPM chip used by some PCs) and to perform encryption securely and with minimal overhead. If you have a good secure code facility, which Apple does, then this gives the Apple software developers the ability to make arbitrary changes to the code, in a secure way, i.e. someone outside of Apple will find it difficult or impossible to make their code masquerade as code from Apple.
So when he stated that it was impossible for Apple to do what was requested of them (despite the fact that they indirectly admitted that it was not, btw), my concerns about his honesty were, unfortunately, confirmed. I then started looking into his past and current posts on other threads, and what I found was a pattern of shouting, insulting, and cursing at others. I think people who behave that way need to have that behavior called out until they either stop or go away. Too many of that sort on a forum, and it becomes an unpleasant place to visit.
Just my opinion, worth what you paid for it :) I'm sure he'll be along shortly to call me an idiot or worse. Hopefully anyone who reads this, or my future posts on his threads, will at least take a "trust but verify" stance with any and all SwordMaker posts.
You are misrepresenting the discussion we had, Scutter. The iPhone 5C in question does NOT have an A9 processor, as I pointed out to you. It has a A6 processor. I also posted multiple sources that provided proof that Apple places the start-up IN SILICON specifically on the later processors to prevent exactly what you were claiming. I also said that it was not impossible on the iPhone 5C in question, but it as on later iPhones. . . unless Apple were to rewrite their entire iOS. YOU were one who kept claiming it was trivial. On ALL of these iPhones there is a secure BOOTSTRAP in silicon which you keep ignoring and in that IS exactly what you say is NOT THERE. I posted links to Apple's own Security White Papers outlining how they were doing this, from both the latest, and the one that applied to the A6 processor that had the Encryption Engine in it, along with the Secure iBoot Bootstrap. You just kept repeating your litany that it couldn't be that way.
I used primary sources from Apple.