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“What?
No Swordmaker comment yet?

All hail the Mothership of Apple©!! d;^)”

Please trust me when I say I cannot stand Apple and some of the articles Swordmaker posts make me want to projectile vomit :-). I’m an Android fanboy (though I am growing completely sick and tired of Google too).

I suspect the FBI’s way of accessing these phones isn’t something someone can do via software. I think they need to take possession of the phone before they can decrypt it. It has to involve some kind of hardware hack. I don’t think iPhone users need to worry about some random exploit that anyone can use.

I saw someone mention that they might be using the fingerprint reader as a way in, but I don’t think the FBI would have overlooked something like that. There wouldn’t have been a need to call in 3rd party consultants to provide that information :-).

My guess is that they identified where the decryption key resides on the die of the CPU ... they can figure out the zeros and ones they need using a focused ion beam setup that’s used for integrated circuit debugging and decrypt storage that way.

I used a focused ion beam machine about 15 years ago to debug an integrated circuit my company was working on. They are frigging neat to say the least (and NOT cheap). While the silicon process we were using was only two metal layers, I saw someone probing a 4 metal layer design and you could easily see straight down to the substrate. You can even see transistors/metal interconnect toggling by watching the metal kind of “pulse” (i.e. there is a glow around the metal when there is no charge, and a lack of glow w. some charge). There was also a means of probing a net to measure a voltage as well as a means to cut metal and deposit it to rework the IC.

This was over 15 years ago ... I’m sure the technology has become jaw dropping since then.

At any rate, identifying a decryption key wouldn’t be too difficult if you know where to look on the die. Depending on the “glow” around the net, you could determine the 1 or 0s. You also need to determine the order ... some snooping around and reverse engineering will let you know that order in relatively little time.