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Snowden: FBI's Claim It Can't Unlock The San Bernardino iPhone Is 'Bullshit' (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Edward Snowden, the whistleblower whose NSA revelations sparked a debate on mass surveillance, has waded into the arguments over the FBI's attempt to force Apple to help it unlock the iPhone 5C of one of the San Bernardino shooters. The FBI says that only Apple can deactivate certain passcode protections on the iPhone, which will allow law enforcement to guess the passcode by using brute-force. Talking via video link from Moscow to the Common Cause Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference, Snowden said: "The FBI says Apple has the 'exclusive technical means' to unlock the phone. Respectfully, that's bullshit." Snowden then went on to tweet his support for an American Civil Liberties Union report saying that the FBI's claims in the case are fraudulent. Apple's clash with the FBI comes to a head in California this month when the two will meet in federal court to debate whether the smartphone manufacturer should be required to weaken security settings on the iPhone of the shooter.
We know the FBI *can* unlock it without help, but we also know that this brings with it a certain level of technical risk that adjusted firmware would not (whereas the firmware would pose a certain level of privacy risk), and an attempt rate that is abysmal at best.
The ACLU report specifically states that they can desolder the storage chip, copy the storage entire, put in a socket (no risk there), plonk the chip in, try, and if it fails - restore the storage to the chip (or a model with equal behavior and characteristics). Several of these steps come with risk, and all of it comes with it the fact that it takes time. A lot of time. Even with a rig that pops the chip out and drops another one in, with chips going on a merry-go-around for reprogramming after N attempts, it's a lot slower than a firmware that would allow an effectively unlimited number of attempts.
Push comes to shove, they can try decapping it and looking straight at the bare metal. But as anybody who does forensic work would know, that's not exactly your go-to method; figuring out the password directly, or figuring out a pre-existing backdoor to bypass protection entirely, would be very much preferable. If disabling the maximum number of attempts is hypothetically an option as long as you can get the manufacturer to agree to do it, hell yes it's on the table.