FBI vs. Apple: Fake Fight?
It's Apple's shareholder meeting day at the time I am writing this, so a good opportunity to ponder the FBI iPhone hacking controversy. Most of the news articles and TV coverage I've seen about the hack that the FBI is trying to force Apple to create, don't fully explain why it's needed. A handful of pieces have noted that this whole run-around would not have been necessary if the FBI hadn't made an iCloud backup early on, but the FBI is now claiming this was not negligent ineptitude on their part, suggesting that "rogue elements within San Bernardino County had reset the Apple ID password without consulting law enforcement."
A few of the reports mention the "10-times you're out" problem, where the phone data is deleted automatically after 10 incorrect password attempts. Still, the FBI could clone the phone's memory and just use brute-force to make different attempts on cloned phones. It's just a 4-digit PIN, so there's only 10,000 different PINs to try. This means that they'd only have to make the clone 1000 times, though there's a 50% chance the PIN will be in the 1st half of the numbers attempted, so on average only 500 10-try attempts will be needed. Sure, making 1000 (or even just 500) phone memory clones and testing them is time-consuming, but it certainly can't take longer than the time to sue Apple all the way to the Supreme Court.
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