The Feds handed the Iphone to an Israeli firm who unlocked it during the last shooter fiasco 2 years ago. Nothing is unbreakable.
That was a 5C model, very different internal architecture. The current architecture is much more secure. Apple made them to be uncrackable by their company even if they want to do it.
Thank you for foregoing the slurs and insults toward Apple users.
The Feds handed an OBSOLETE iPhone 5c, released two years before the terrorist attack, was the last of the older generation iPhones which debuted with the iPhone 4 in 2010, five years earlier, and which did not have the latest technology in security, the Secure Enclave and the Encryption Engine Processor, an entirely new concept in security as a separate unit from the Data processor, which was introduced in the iPhone 5S simultaneously as the iPhone 5c. The Feds gave that older model iPhone to the Israeli firm to break a four digit passcode which, if it did not have built-in time delays and finally a data erasure feature, could have taken them a little over 5 ½ hours trying each of the 10,000 possible combinations of four digits from 0000 to 9999, to unlock. Had that iPhone been a more modern, secure technology iPhone 5s or later, they'd still be trying and not succeeding.
Many hackers have been trying to break into a Secure Enclave iOS device since they came out in 2013 and not a one has succeeded yet. As Coronal has stated, had anyone succeeded, they would have been crowing to the heavens about their success. Just last month, one hacker claimed to have succeeded in finding just ONE item hidden in the Secure Enclave... the Secure Enclave Processor (SEP) firmware encryption KEY. . . and triumphantly published it on GitHub. Here it is:
a6ff60f2fcf3cdcaaf735e1683418ff56828540cd92ac15f3144ed4dc9d5bcb34c01cc8154bc22c3658d82b6c439340b
What he thought was the key, is not really THE key. . . it's just one of many keys in the Secure Enclave, and a very minor one. Moreover, its a portion of a key that happens to be unique to his iPhone. It is also the ONLY one that is allowed to be accessed from the outside because from time-to-time the SEP firmware has to be updated. . . and requires a key to permit updating of the Encrypted software. It provides NO access to any of the parts of the key that will unlock the iPhone to provide access to user data. The only reason he could even SEE this key was he had unlocked his iPhone in the first place. . . and was approaching it from the extremely limited software to update the firmware. It was doing what it was designed to do. Apple even provides a tool to access it and read it.
Just one of the pieces of the actual 256 bit Encryption key is constructed from is a 40 character Universally Unique ID (UUID) randomly assigned to the Secure Enclave Processor and burned to it when the processor is made. No record of this 40 character UUID is ever made, kept, or recorded outside of the Secure Enclave inside the SoC where it is buried deep in a multilevel integrated circuit, impossible to locate without destroying the IC and other hardwired algorithms required to manipulate it and other burned data required to build the actual AES key.
Another piece is another 40 character string which is the same for all devices in the model range. This is the Device ID (DID).
The next piece is a truly random number generated from the environmental sensors of the iOS device. Data is sensed from the cameras, GPS, microphones, positional sensors, etc. sampled when the user first enters the AppleID, and then combined to create this random number by an algorithm to create a 48 character random number.
All of these four elements are then entangled together by another algorithm to create the actual encryption/decryption key. . . which will be padded out to 144 characters but can be longer. . . the key WILL NOT BE STORED and will instead be re-created each time the passcode is re-entered after validation. If the passcode is not validated, the iPhone is not unlocked and nothing happens,