In an interview given to RT, software legend John McAfee claims that unlocking the iPhone is a “half-hour job.” This part of the interview is just wrong: it may have been the case that passwords were stored in memory in the past, but I don’t believe that’s the case any more. For instance, if I were Apple and I was implementing the iPhone unlock system, I’d encrypt the disk without storing the password, and when the user enters the password I’d attempt to decrypt the disk with that key. I’d then check to see if some known (and non-sensitive) value in memory was correctly decrypted or gibberish.
He does raise an interesting dilemma, however, and that’s that either:
- The FBI does not know how to access the iPhone’s information, and they should because there a well-funded federal agency;
- The FBI does know how to access the iPhone’s information, and so they’re deceiving the American people.
I find (1) much more likely in this scenario, or rather, that they do not know how to access the iPhone’s information easily, and would prefer that they have a precedent to get Apple to do it in the future. I find this more likely because iPhone’s have zero day exploits: I don’t have one, I wouldn’t know one if I saw one, but it’s a massive user base with a large attack surface area, they undoubtedly exist and the FBI undoubtedly have access to people that can get them. But it’s hard, costly, and the best hackers smoke weed and don’t wear suits.