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Comment by pbkhrv | Hacker News Reader

How practical is it to remove-restore-replace the NAND chip every 10 tries if you have to search through millions of combinations?

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> If it turns out that the auto-erase feature is on, and the Effaceable Storage gets erased, they can remove the chip, copy the original information back in, and replace it. If they plan to do this many times, they can attach a “test socket” to the circuit board that makes it easy and fast to do this kind of chip swapping.

> If the FBI doesn't have the equipment or expertise to do this, they can hire any one of dozens of data recovery firms that specialize in information extraction from digital devices.

Are there any data recovery firms that advertise the ability to do exactly what the FBI wants here?

You mean besides McAffee? lol

http://www.dailydot.com/politics/john-mcafee-lied-iphone-app...

Presumably you'd only have to remove it once, then install it in an easily-controlled circuit that would selectively connect it back to the rest of the phone?

If the user was using a 4 digit pin code it would only be 10,000 combinations.

Where do you get the millions of combinations figure?

Maybe it was a type and he meant to say: >You see, a six digit passcode has one million possible combinations instead of 10,000.

Wasn't a typo, I did mean "millions", see my comment above.

for passcode, iPhone supports 4-Digit numeric code (10k combinations), 6-Digit numeric code (1 million combinations), "custom numeric code" (arbitrary length, millions of combinations), or "custom alphanumeric code" (arbitrary length, millions of combinations)

One obvious workaround would be to emulate it with an FPGA.

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